Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

NEW WRIT (DUMFRIES)

Motion made, and Question proposed,

That Mr. Speaker do issue his Warrant to the Clerk of the Crown to make out a new Writ for the electing of a Member to serve in this present Parliament for Dumfries in the room of the Rt. Hon. Niall Malcolm Stewart Macpherson, called up to the House of Peers.—[Mr. Redmayne.]

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I should like to ask why the hurry in this case, because the Government are not greatly concerned about—

Mr. Speaker: Does the hon. Member wish to debate this matter? If so, it must be deferred.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Yes, Mr. Speaker.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (Mr. Martin Redmayne): I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

AIR NAVIGATION

Return ordered,
of Statement on the financial problems of the British Overseas Airways Corporation.—[Mr. Amery.]

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTRY OF AVIATION

Scotland-London Services

Mr. Hector Hughes: asked the Minister of Aviation if he is aware that air flights between Scotland and London are few, uncertain, unpunctual in starting and arriving, and lack co-ordination with flights from abroad so that travellers miss their connections; and if he will take steps, by legislation and general direction, to rectify this.

The Minister of Aviation (Mr. Julian Amery): No, Sir.

Mr. Hughes: Will the Minister say why his Ministry is no longer "Civil Aviation"? Does he realise that this uncertainty and unpunctuality which is complained of in my Question is bad for business and contrary to the expressed policy of the Government to foster trade, industry, commerce and employment in Scotland? What does he propose to do about this? Will he insert the word "Civil" once more into his title?

Mr. Amery: I confess I am rather surprised by—if I may so call it—the ingratitude of the hon. and learned Member. I understand that British European Airways have just laid on a daily service from Aberdeen to London and return.

An Hon. Member: Why return?

AW 681 Military Transport Aircraft

Mr. Wigg: asked the Minister of Aviation whether he has yet decided which engine is to be used in the AW 681 military transport aircraft.

Mr. J. Amery: I hope to be able to make an announcement shortly.

Mr. Wigg: It is months now since the right hon. Gentleman made a statement about this aircraft, and is he aware that since that time there have been doubts first of all as to whether Bristol Siddeley would supply the engine or whether Rolls-Royce should supply the engine? May we be told whether the aircraft is to be cancelled, or whether it is just that the right hon. Gentleman cannot make up his mind about the right engine?

Mr. Amery: I hope to make an announcement shortly, as I said, but let me assure the hon. Member that the delay will in no sense retard the development of the aircraft itself.

Mr. McMaster: Can my right hon. Friend inform the House whether this aircraft is still planned to have vertical take-off capacity?

Mr. Amery: As I have said, I think on more than one occasion, in the House,


it will be so designed as to be capable of being developed with vertical take-off capacity.

Mr. Cronin: Bearing in mind that the operational requirement for this particular aircraft was made three years ago, is not this delay particularly insupportable?

Mr. Amery: There is no delay in the development of the aircraft but merely a delay in the announcement of my decision.

Mr. Wigg: Surely, if the aircraft is to fly it has got to have an engine. If the Minister has not made up his mind about the engine, when will he?

Mr. Amery: The hon. Gentleman misunderstands the point. The delay in announcing a decision about the aircraft will not delay the time in which the aeroplane is introduced into service.

B.E.A. Route (Manchester-Genoa)

Mr. Lubbock: asked the Minister of Aviation why he has directed the Air Transport Licensing Board not to hear an application by British European Airways for a new route from Manchester to Genoa.

Mr. J. Amery: I directed the Board in accordance with Section 2(3) of the Civil Aviation (Licensing) Act, 1960. I did so because the air service proposed by British European Airways would, in my opinion, involve the negotiation with the Italian Government of rights which it would be inexpedient to seek at the present time.

Mr. Lubbock: The Minister has merely quoted the wording of Section 2(3) in his reply. Are not we entitled to an explanation of why it is inexpedient for these rights to be sought at this time, and does not he think that this decision will have a very harmful effect on the Corporation which is responsible for carrying the British flag to all the countries of Europe?

Mr. Amery: No, Sir, that is not my view; and had it been my view I should have decided otherwise.

Mr. Lee: How often has the Minister used these particular powers on other occasions? Has there not been something of a scandal about the route to

Genoa which, indeed, has cost the public certain amounts of money in the preference given to an independent airline? Will the Minister now say what would be the financial effect if B.E.A. got the right to run to Genoa in order that we may understand what the nation is losing as a result of present policy?

Mr. Amery: I think that these powers have been used on more than one occasion where international agreements have been concerned, but I should like to check that. The hon. Gentleman has asked me the question without notice. I am satisfied that it would be prejudicial to our aviation position at this moment to seek further rights from the Italian Government. This is a judgment which I have to make. It would clearly be unwise for me to go into detail on why an international negotiation would at this moment not be expedient.

Accidents to Passengers (Compensation)

Mr. Boyden: asked the Minister of Aviation why private civil airlines in Great Britain fix a limit of £3,000 compensation to dependants of passengers killed in accidents when British European Airways' limit is £6,000.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Aviation (Mr. Neil Marten): Under existing legislation, United Kingdom air carriers are generally entitled to limit their liability in the event of death or injury to some £3,000 per passenger. There is, however, nothing to stop them voluntarily making settlements in excess of this figure.

Mr. Boyden: Will the hon. Gentleman use his influence to see that they come up to the B.E.A. figure? Is it not grossly unfair to the travelling public that private airlines should pay less compensation than is paid by a nationalised airline?

Mr. Marten: I agree that the figure of £3,000 is too low, and I hope that the example set by B.E.A. will be followed by other airlines; but I must point out that the delay involves matters under The Hague Protocol and the Warsaw Convention. There is a quite complicated legal reason why we have not yet settled this question.

TSR 2 Aircraft

Mr. P. Williams: asked the Minister of Aviation whether he will make a statement on the progress of the TSR 2.

Mr. Stonehouse: asked the Minister of Aviation (1) what was the result of the efforts of Her Majesty's Government to sell the TSR 2 to Australia;
(2) what is the estimated total cost of research and development, and of production, of the TSR 2; and on what basis these estimates have been made.

10. Sir G. Nabarro: asked the Minister of Aviation whether he will make a statement on the TSR 2 aircraft and anticipated operational date in Royal Air Force squadrons.

Mr. A. Lewis: asked the Minister of Aviation whether he will make a statement on the cost and late delivery of the TSR 2 aircraft, and on the difficulties in connection with its supply to Australia.

Mr. Lubbock: asked the Minister of Aviation what is the breakdown between development and production expenditure on the TSR 2 within the overall stated limit of £400 million; and whether the limit is to be revised.

Mr. J. Amery: The TSR 2 aircraft is making good progress. It is expected to fly early next year. As already stated, we plan to introduce this aircraft into service in the mid-1960s.
It is not the practice to disclose the precise dates when combat aircraft are planned to enter service or to give estimates of their development and production costs.
As the House will be aware, the Australian Government have decided not to buy the TSR 2.

Mr. Williams: Can my right hon. Friend give an assurance that this aircraft is proceeding according to plan and that the Government maintain their intention to introduce it as an operational aircraft? Further, can he comment on the attitude of a number of hon. and right hon. Members opposite to the effect that, while believing in the advocacy of technological research, they are not willing to back it in this particular case? Finally, can

he say how many people, of what grades, have their employment involved in the production of this aircraft?

Mr. Amery: Yes, I can give an assurance that it is going forward as planned. When it flies early next year, it will be only about four years from the time when the contract was first placed, which is a very creditable achievement. As to employment, I can say that, including the airframe, the engine and the electronics and equipment side, the jobs of 15,000 to 20,000 people must be involved. As regards statements made by spokesmen of the party opposite, I can only say that I think that their opposition to the maintenance of the deterrent and some of the other things they have said were, no doubt, a contributory factor in the decision of the Australian Government.

Mr. Stonehouse: Does the Minister realise that his last comment will be treated with the contempt that it deserves and that this party is really interested in technical advances in all these fields?
In regard to Question No. 7, to which he did not reply, may I ask whether the right hon. Gentleman is aware that there is a great deal of feeling in Australia that, as the Commonwealth was let down by Britain during the Common Market negotiations, Australia owes us no particular loyalty, and, on this point also, can he give an assurance that there was no mistake made in the transmission of the new lower price of the TSR 2 to Australia at a crucial stage in the negotiations?

Mr. Amery: I am satisfied that the transmission of our offers on price were perfectly well executed. The hon. Gentleman refers to Australian anxieties about Common Market policy. My own experience, limited though it may have been over two years as Secretary of State for Air and one year as Minister of Aviation, has been that the Australians are much more disturbed by the opposition of the party opposite to the nuclear deterrent and by doubts about whether the party opposite would stand by our allies in Singapore.

Sir G. Nabarro: Will my right hon. Friend confirm now that this is a highly sophisticated and versatile aircraft


capable of both a nuclear and a conventional rôle, and will he denounce in unequivocal terms the unpatriotic activities of hon. Members opposite?

Mr. Amery: I can confirm that the TSR 2 is capable of both nuclear and conventional attack in both the tactical and the strategic rôle. I think that some of the comments which have been made by hon. Members opposite, notably the comment of the hon. Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Healey) that this was the biggest scandal since the South Sea Bubble, should be treated not only with the contempt which they deserve but with the full realisation that they can only damage the export possibilities of a very fine aircraft.

Mr. Lubbock: Is the Minister aware of the great anxiety which has been expressed in informed quarters about the rising cost of this project? Are not we, at least, entitled to a statement from him that the original figure of £400 million could be maintained, in view of some estimates which have been made that it could rise to as much as £1,000 million?

Mr. Amery: I have explained that it is not our practice to give precise costs for either development or production programmes in respect of military aircraft. However, I have gone on record myself as saying that I should be astonished if the research and development of the aircraft cost even a quarter of the £1,000 million which has been talked about. I must add that I think that one of the most surprising things in all this is that the official Front Bench spokesman opposite should see fit to base himself upon figures supplied by the Observer newspaper.

Mr. Healey: Is the Minister aware that many of us would be happier about the defences of this country if he would succeed in distinguishing between his Ministerial responsibilities as Minister of Aviation and his electoral needs as the Member for an extremely vulnerable seat where the TSR 2 aircraft happens to be made? Can he tell the House whether he disputes the statement made by the Australian Prime Minister that the reason why the Australian Government did not choose the TSR 2 aircraft was, first, that the Australian Air Staff regarded the TFX as more suitable in

most ways to its needs and, second, that the terms on which the TFX was offered were considerably more favourable than those on which the British Government offered the TSR 2?

Mr. Amery: It would not be appropriate for me to comment on what Sir Robert Menzies may have said.

Mr. Snow: Highly selective.

Mr. Amery: It is, no doubt, possible for the United States, which would be making 1,000 or more of the TFX, to produce a lower price than we can in making 100 or more of a similar aircraft. This is a fact of economic life which we have to face.
I repudiate very strongly the hon. Gentleman's suggestion that I have been mixing up electioneering with my responsibilities. How he has the face to suggest it when he himself has tried to swallow, hook, line and sinker, the Observer's figure of £1,000 million beats me.

Mr. McMaster: In view of the attacks by the party opposite on the production of this aircraft, will my right hon. Friend inform the House about the urgent need felt by the Royal Air Force, particularly in Germany, for an early delivery of this new tactical-strike-reconnaissance aircraft to replace the Canberra?

Mr. Amery: Orders have been placed, as the hon. Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Healey) would have seen if he had read the newspapers. They were placed several weeks ago and the Royal Air Force will receive this aircraft as soon as it can be delivered, regardless of the criticism raised by irresponsible elements in the party opposite.

Mr. Cronin: Is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that the attitude of my right hon. and hon. Friends throughout has been one of constructive criticism towards this aircraft and that our apprehension is due to the delays and the prodigal expenditure? Will he indicate why there has been this prolonged delay in giving a production order for the TSR 2 if he wishes to have it in service with the R.A.F. as quickly as possible?

Mr. Amery: The hon. Gentleman has been more constructive than most of his


right hon. and hon. Friends, but he can hardly expect me to accept his general statement after the South Sea Bubble reference I have noted.
As I said, orders have been placed and long-dated materials are being bought for 30 aircraft to be put in squadron service, and this is only the first batch.

Sir G. Nabarro: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. P. Williams: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. In view of the vital importance: of this aircraft to the strategic defence of the country, I beg to give notice that I will raise this matter on the Adjournment at the earliest possible moment.

Mr. Speaker: rose—

Sir G. Nabarro: rose—

Hon. Members: Order.

Sir G. Nabarro: Further to that point of order, having regard to the satisfactory—

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentletnan appears to be a little unobservant. I am on my feet.

Mr. Wigg: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. I beg to give notice that, on the occasion of this being raised on the Adjournment, I shall also refer to the justification of the Johnsonian dictum that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams) has given notice that he will raise this matter on the Adjournment. I do not think that other hon. Members can give notice of other topics that will be raised at the same time.

Concord Aircraft

Mr. P. Williams: asked the Minister of Aviation whether he will make a statement on the progress of the Concorde.

Mr. Williams: I ask this Question with an apology for the wrong spelling of "Concord".

Mr. J. Amery: Collaboration with our French partners in this joint project over the past year has been excellent, and satisfactory progress has been made. Work has started on jigs and tools and

on the manufacture of bench test development engines. Tests and researches are proceeding into the various operational aspects. Orders for the aircraft have been received from four American airlines.

Mr. Williams: While welcoming the placing of these orders, may I ask my right hon. Friend what is the position of orders for the control and guidance system of the aircraft?

Mr. Amery: I should like notice in detail of that question, but orders for the equipment of the aircraft will be divided on a 50–50 basis with our French friends in the same way as, broadly speaking, orders for the engines and airframe.

Mr. Rankin: Can the right hon. Gentleman bring us up to date and say how many Concords have been ordered?

Mr. Amery: I believe the figure is about thirty altogether. I have not, however, the detailed figures with me. Four American airlines have placed orders and, of course, B.O.A.C. and Air France have taken out options.

Sir G. Nicholson: Does not my right hon. Friend agree that it is really important that in this country we should spell "Concord" without an "e"in order to get national credit for that part of the aircraft to be made by us? Will he take steps to circulate to the Press definite instructions to spell "Concord" as an English word in English newspapers for an English plane?

Mr. Amery: I was glad to accept the original apology of my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams) on this. The beauty of the name "Concord" is that it has the same meaning in English and in French and that the modification in the spelling is very small.

Mr. Lee: What is the selling price?

Mr. Amery: I should require notice of that question.

Skyvan Aircraft

Mr. Stratton Mills: asked the Minister of Aviation if he will make a statement on the future of Skyvan.

Mr. J. Amery: The prototype aircraft has now been fitted with Astazou


turbo-prop engines. I understand that the development flying programme is proceeding satisfactorily. I expect to reach a decision soon on the future of the project.

Mr. Stratton Mills: Is my right hon. Friend aware that the delay in coming to a decision is really intolerable? Does he recall that, at the end of July, he said that he hoped to reach a decision fairly soon? Can he give an indication as to when a decision may be reached?

Mr. Amery: I am trying very hard to help my hon. Friend and the interests for which he speaks on this matter but, frankly, I do not think that the delay has been intolerable. There is still no firm order, or firm indication of an order, for the project.

Aircraft Noise (Double-glazed Windows)

Mr. Gresham Cooke: asked the Minister of Aviation whether he is aware that double glazing of windows, rather than the construction of double windows, can be now carried out for a comparatively small sum so as to insulate rooms against noise; and whether he will seek powers to give small grants to householders living near airports so as to enable them to double glaze windows on a do-it-yourself basis.

Mr. Marten: I know of no inexpensive method of double glazing windows which substantially improves noise insulation. Simple methods of insulating windows against external noise by using screens of materials other than glass have recently been tested by the Building Research Station and are now being evaluated by the Ministry of Aviation.
I will bear in mind the suggestion in the second part of the Question when I receive the report from my officials, but I fear that grants for this purpose may be open to the same objections as those proposed by the Wilson Committee.

Mr. Gresham Cooke: Is my hon. Friend aware that a householder has, for the sum of £20, double glazed the windows in the chief rooms of his house and says that it has made a lot of difference in shutting out noise? Therefore, would not small grants of £10 or £15 to householders for this purpose

be very welcome in the case of those willing to do the work themselves?

Mr. Marten: I take the point, but once one started giving grants for this sort of thing it could spread very widely. As the Lord President of the Council said in another place, it would be very difficult indeed to limit the spread of these grants.

Mr. Hunter: Will the hon. Gentleman use his influence with the Government to arrange a debate on the Wilson Report dealing with this subject?

Mr. Marten: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman can raise that through the usual channels.

Air Freight Services

Mr. Awbery: asked the Minister of Aviation, in view of the possibilities in the transport of freight by air to relieve road transport congestion, if he will take steps to encourage the development of air cargo carrying services.

Mr. Marten: I am always anxious to encourage the orderly and economic development of the transport of freight by air. But it is very doubtful whether any conceivable development of air freight services over the next few years could materially reduce the total volume of freight traffic carried on this country's roads.

Mr. Awbery: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the carrying of cargo by air is a new service, that there are great potentialities in it and that it could relieve both coastal traffic and traffic on our roads? Is he further aware that it can be developed adequately only by the Government and not by private enterprise? Will he look at this again?

Mr. Marten: Yes, Sir. We always keep this matter under review but we also keep it in perspective. The amount of freight traffic moved by air within the United Kingdom is about 5 million ton miles a year. Almost this amount, on average, is carried every hour on the roads. A one hundredfold increase in air freight traffic on domestic air routes, which is quite inconceivable in the forseeable future, would still represent only 1 per cent. of the present volume of freight traffic on the roads. This is a great problem.

B.O.A.C. (Transatlantic Passengers)

Mr. Farr: asked the Minister of Aviation what percentage of total transatlantic: flying civilian passengers British Overseas Airways Corporation has carried in each of the past six years.

Mr. J. Amery: The Annual Report of the British Overseas Airways Corporation for 1962–63 shows the Corporation's share of the Great Britain-North America traffic in the last five years as 37.5. 39.9, 41.4. 41.8 and 37.4 per cent. respectively.
If my hon. Friend is interested in the overall Europe-North America traffic, the Corporation's share is 13.1 per cent.

Mr. Farr: I am obliged to my right hon. Friend for those details. Is there any special reason for the sharp decline in the proportion of the transatlantic traffic that B.O.A.C. has enjoyed over the past two years?

Mr. Amery: There are a number of reasons and I think that we shall be going into them shortly when we debate the B.O.A.C. White Paper and the new Borrowing Powers Bill. I think a major reason has been that the introduction of big jets on a number of services which used to stage through London means that more aircraft now fly direct between the United States and the Continent.

Aircraft Commanders'Powers (Convention)

Mr. Rankin: asked the Minister of Aviation if Her Majesty's Government has ratified or proposes to ratify the International Convention which recently agreed to increase the powers of aircraft commanders in respect of passengers who endanger the safety of the aircraft or break the laws of its country of registration.

Mr. Marten: The Convention, which was signed by our plenipotentiaries on 14th September, 1963, is now being examined in detail. When this is completed, the question of ratification will be considered.

Mr. Rankin: Would not the hon. Gentleman agree that commanders of aircraft should have all the authority necessary for the safe conduct of their

machines? When it is sought to increase the legal powers of the captains, as in this case, will he remember that he might come up against difficulties on international routes because of language complications? Would he not agree that it might be better to increase the discretion of the captain in landing his 'plane in cases of sudden difficulty?

Mr. Marten: I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his views and, as we are studying this Convention, we will certainly take note of what he has just said.

Safety Standards

Mr. Rankin: asked the Minister of Aviation what steps he is proposing to take for the improvement of safety standards on British scheduled air services.

Mr. Lee: asked the Minister of Aviation whether he is aware of the heavier accident rate on non-scheduled flights than that on scheduled ones; and what action he proposes to take to reduce such accidents.

Mr. Marten: While the accident rate on non-scheduled flights is higher than on scheduled flights the total number of accidents is so small that valid comparison is not easy. It is the Government's aim to improve air safety generally and safety standards apply alike to all operators. The White Paper of 1962 outlined measures in hand including air operators' certificatesand improvements in pilot training and in airworthiness control. In co-operation with those concerned, particularly constructors, operators and pilots, these measures are being constantly developed in the light of experience including the analysis of accidents.

Mr. Rankin: Is not the hon. Gentleman aware that the United Kingdom survey of aircraft accidents which was published for 1962 showed that in 1961 and 1962, 227 passengers and crew were killed in British United Kingdom air services, 185 of them on non-scheduled flights? Does he think that those are small numbers? Ought they not to trouble him? Will he make some comment on why there are so many accidents on non-scheduled flights?

Mr. Marten: This is a very wide subject. I share the hon. Member's anxiety and I take it most seriously. Among other things, I attended the recent symposium on flight safety which studied this question. However, the figures of deaths which the hon. Member gave can be put another way, that is, by comparing the number of accidents on scheduled and non-scheduled flights. Both classes had two fatal accidents each in 1961–62, but the scheduled operators flew about three times as much. Much of this goes back to the correct analysis of the accident figures, which we are trying to improve.

Mr. Lee: Would not the hon. Gentleman agree that we cannot possibly tolerate a position in which one type of flight shows a far higher incidence of accidents than another and that the minimum must be our aim? If the numbers of people flying continue to increase as now, will not this problem of accidents on non-scheduled flights become a very grave issue, far from being a small matter? Is there not proof positive in the figures which we now have that it is far more dangerous to fly on a non-scheduled flight than on a scheduled flight?

Mr. Marten: I urge the hon. Member to treat these figures with considerable reserve at this stage. The figures for the two years for which statistics of non-scheduled flights have been kept are insufficient to establish a trend for the accident rate for non-scheduled flights. Nevertheless, I agree that this is a very serious matter.

London Airport (Emergency Warnings)

Mr. Hunter: asked the Minister of Aviation how many emergency warnings have been given this year at London Airport in connection with the take-off and landing of aircraft.

Mr. Marten: Emergency warnings can be given either after an accident has occurred on take-off or landing or when an aircraft in flight is known or is thought to have got into difficulties. Since January this year there have been three emergency warnings after aircraft accidents, 64 under the full emergency procedure and 243 local standby warnings.

Mr. Hunter: Does the hon. Gentleman's Department hold an inquiry after every incident? Is he aware that on 6th November a Canadian jet airliner was allowed to take off in thickening fog and that it came down just after take-off in a field only 300 yards from some houses? Who was responsible for allowing an aircraft to take off from London Airport when there was thickening fog?

Mr. Marten: We hold inquiries when accidents occur. That case is the subject of an inquiry and I do not wish to comment on it at this stage. Of the 64 incidents under full emergency procedure, all happily made safe landings.

Liquor and Cigarette Sales

Sir J. Langford-Holt: asked the Minister of Aviation if he is aware that the British Overseas Airways Corporation and British European Airways are making margins of profit on liquor and, cigarettes many times that practised in the trades concerned; and if he will, in the public interest, issue a general direction forbidding this.

Mr. Marten: The price charged for cigarettes and liquor is entirely a matter for the Corporations.
The answer to the second part of the Question is "No, Sir".

Sir J. Langford-Holt: That will not do. Is my hon. Friend aware that this applies not only to B.O.A.C., but to every airline operator to whom he gives permission to operate from London Airport? Is it not quite wrong that these airline operators should use a large duty concession which they get when selling cigarettes not for passing it on to the public, but for their own use?

Mr. Marten: I sympathise with my hon. Friend a great deal, but it is up to the discretion of the airline to charge what price it thinks it can commercially charge. As for giving a directive, it would be entirely inappropriate to apply the statutory powers of general permission under Section 5 of the Air Corporations Act to the pricing arrangements in question. These powers may be used only in relation to matters affecting the national interest.

Sir J. Langford-Holt: In that case, would my hon. Friend consider giving facilities for traders who will pass on this concession to operate at London Airport so that it can be passed on to passengers?

Mr. Marten: No. I do not think that that falls within the bounds of my Department.

V.T.O.L. Aircraft

Mr. McMaster: asked the Minister of Aviation what further research and development he intends to initiate in the field of multi-jet vertical take-off and landing aircraft.

Mr. J. Amery: There is at present no United Kingdom requirement for the development of an aircraft using multi-jet techniques. I am, however, considering with the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany the possibility of a joint experimental project. This would be directed to the application of the multi-jet principle to transport aircraft. No decisions have yet been taken.

Mr. McMaster: Is my right hon. Friend aware of the danger of sharing the results of pioneering in this country with Germany, France and other countries who have successfully developed multi-jet planes, so that we are in danger of losing the advantage which we have gained as a result of pioneering in this revolutionary development?

Mr. Amery: I hope that what I have said about the experimental project under discussion will allay some of my hon. Friend's fears.

Sir J. Eden: asked the Minister of Aviation whether he will make a statement on the progress of the Hawker P 1127 and P 1154 vertical take-off and landing aircraft.

Mr. J. Amery: Development of the P 1127 for the tripartite evaluation programme is proceeding satisfactorily. The first of the nine aircraft ordered for the programme is expected to fly early next year and the evaluation should start as planned early in 1965. Development of the P 1154 is continuing under holding contracts pending a final decision on the project.

Sir J. Eden: Is it not a fact that the P 1127 is the most advanced aircraft of its type in the world? Can my right hon. Friend tell the House what steps are being taken to sell this aircraft, or components of it, to our N.A.T.O. allies? Can he further assure the House that this aircraft will be used as a basis for providing the future needs both of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force?

Mr. Amery: The P 1127 has been put forward as a possible Fiat G 91 replacement aircraft for those countries which have a requirement of this kind. It has not as yet found a market for that purpose, but the work done on theP 1127 will be of vital importance to the development of the P 1154, which has been considered in the first place as a Hunter replacement for the Royal Air Force and possibly as a Sea Vixen replacement for the Royal Navy. A final decision on this project has still to be taken.

Mr. Healey: Can the right hon. Gentleman explain why, in view of the fact that he has answered his hon. Friend's Question about the P 1154, he transferred similar Questions by myself and my hon. Friend to the Minister of Defence? Is this another example of trying to pass the buck for an unpleasant decision?

Mr. Amery: No, Sir. The hon. Member should not misread motives like that. The Question to which he refers is one of policy, regarding the suitability of a certain aircraft to the requirement of the Services. I have answered this Question because it concerns the progress of certain programmes—the P 1127 and the P 1154.

Mr. Cronin: As there is widespread apprehension on the subject, can the Minister at least make a statement as to the progress made in developing the P 1154 for the Royal Navy?

Mr. Amery: I was saying that the development of the P 1154, which is still in an early stage—that is to say, at a stage where no differentiation is yet required between the two Services—is continuing under a holding contract, pending a decision on the contract as a whole.

Short Brothers and Harland (Freighter Aircraft)

Mr. McMaster: asked the Minister of Aviation what plans he has to place development work in the field of freighter aircraft with Short Brothers and Harland.

Mr. J. Amery: I have no new plans beyond projects already announced.

Mr. McMaster: Is my right hon. Friend aware of the worries of the design staff at Short Bros, and Harland, who have put forward many suggestions, including modifications of the Belfast freighter with more powerful turbo-prop or jet engines? Is he not aware that further long-term planning would ensure the future of this valued design staff?

Mr. Amery: Yes, Sir. I am in constant touch with the management at Shorts and well aware of the suggestions put forward. Of course, before we can embark on anything of this kind we have to see whether there is a market for the aircraft.

VC 10 Aircraft (New Zealand)

Mr. John Hall: asked the Minister of Aviation what recent assistance was given in the promotion of sales of the VC 10 aircraft in New Zealand; what was the result; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. J. Amery: The British Aircraft Corporation made every effort to sell the VC 10 to Tasman Empire Airways Ltd. My Department and the C.R.O. gave them all possible help. I myself was in personal touch with New Zealand Ministers during the negotiations. The airline and the New Zealand Government however decided that the DC 8-50 was the most suitable aircraft and that neither the Boeing 707 nor the VC 10, which were also evaluated, would have offered such good economic prospects for T.E.A.L.'s particular route pattern. They therefore placed an order for three DC 8-50s.

Mr. Hall: Is my right hon. Friend convinced that this order for the American aircraft was placed entirely on commercial considerations?

Mr. Amery: It is always very difficult to say in these matters. We made every effort on our side, and the Boeing

people—the American competitors of the DC 8-50—made every effort on their side. As far as I can judge, this matter was decided upon a commercial evaluation.

Sir J. Langford-Holt: When my right hon. Friend says "I myself was in personal touch", does he mean, "I was in touch"?

Mr. Amery: My hon. Friend is quite right to raise this matter. I used the phrase "I myself" because Ministers often mean their Departments when they use the first person singular. I wished to indicate that I, personally, was in touch.

Oral Answers to Questions — SCOTLAND

Private Social Clubs

Mr. W. Baxter: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he is aware of the growing concern that private social clubs for the purposes of gaming may be established without requiring the consent of the licensing authority or the local inhabitants of the area involved; and if he will introduce amending legislation to deal with this situation.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Michael Noble): I have received a number of representations and am considering them.

Mr. Baxter: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that we would like him to consider this matter very urgently, in view of the fact that private gambling clubs such as are being established in the town of Bridge of Allan can be opened irrespective of the wishes of the inhabitants of thelocality? Is he aware that the consent of the local licensing authority is required before a betting office is established in the locality, and that even a charity draw has to be registered with the local authority? Under those circumstances, in view of the feelings that exist locally about these matters, will the right hon. Gentleman show his interest in democracy by giving power to the local authority to grant or reject such applications?

Mr. Noble: This is a serious problem, and I am not saying that some control is out of the question. In the case to which the hon. Member refers, concerning Bridge of Allan, my decision


was reached after careful consideration of the reporter's recommendation and all relevant circumstances. But in determining a. planning appeal I must be careful not to use my planning powers to circumvent the provisions of other legislation passed by this House.

Mr. Baxter: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the fact that it was the unanimous decision of the planning authority for this area that the application should be turned down, and that the Minister's overriding of that decision has gone against the judgment of the local inhabitants of Bridge of Allan?

Mr. Noble: The hon. Member is not quite clear about my answer. The point is that I was using my powers under the Planning Acts, and in such cases I cannot take into consideration views expressed by however many people on some other matter.

Mr. Ross: Surely that was exactly the local planning authority's interpretation of its powers. We sincerely hope that the Secretary of State will confine his "live-it-up" prejudices to his own area.

Disabled Drivers

Mr. Brewis: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he will now authorise mini-cars rather than invalid tricycles to be issued to disabled drivers in rural areas who are working several miles away from their home address.

Mr. Noble: No, Sir. The provision of mini-cars, for patients other than war pensioners would probably require legislation and I could not give it priority over other improvements in the National Health Service.

Mr. Brewis: Will my right hon. Friend take into account the fact that these invalid tricycles have neither a heating system nor a spare wheel? It may be all right in urban areas, where assistance can be easily obtained, but on a remote country road a disabled driver who has a puncture may almost die of cold before assistance reaches him.

Mr. Noble: I will certainly take note of what my hon. Friend says. We are continually trying to improve these tricycles, and have been making efforts

recently to try to improve the provision of spare parts, such as spare tyres, in various rural areas.

Traffic Censuses

Mr. Brewis: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether it is the policy of his Department to employ children under school leaving age for traffic census duties; and if he will issue a direction that in future traffic enumerators will be engaged through the local employment exchange.

Mr. Noble: Traffic censuses are normally carried out by localhighway authorities and I am not aware that children under school-leaving age have been employed for this purpose.

Mr. Brewis: Surely it is much better to employ the fathers of the families rather than the children. As this is a very small matter, surely we should take into account what we save in unemployment pay and issue some directive.

Mr. Noble: My hon. Friend probably is aware that in his area there have been three traffic censuses in the last twenty-five years and that each lasted for a week. I can pay a local authority only a 50 per cent. grant towards its costs, and I must leave it to the local authority to use the available labour sensibly and effectively.

Forth Road Bridge (Tolls)

Mr. W. Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will make a statement on the toll charges to be imposed on users of the Forth Road Bridge; and whether, in view of the serious economic situation in areas depending on and served by the bridge, he will reconsider the policy of the imposition of tolls.

Mr. Noble: When the Joint Board submits its proposed schedule of tolls I will, if this seems necessary, arrange a public local inquiry into the adequacy of the schedule to meet the Board's financial obligations. I do not believe that tolls will have a significant effect on the great contribution the bridge will make to economic development in the areas which it serves and no change of policy is contemplated.

Mr. Hamilton: Can the right hon. Gentleman say why he or his Department should have commented on the suggested flat-rate toll of 2s. 6d. before the official reports were made to him? In view of the fact that the Government's mandate is running out—indeed they never had one in Scotland—would it not be better for them to defer action on this matter until after the election?

Mr. Noble: I have read comments that perhaps I and my Department moved a little quicker than was necessary. This is exactly the opposite of what hon. Members opposite often accuse me of. If I was wrong I apologise. As fora mandate, I hope that hon. Members opposite will not have, as their foreword to the next election in Scotland, "Promises agreed and made should be broken".

Mr. Woodburn: I agree that a bargain was made and that, if there is no change in the willingness of the bargaining parties, it should be kept. In view of the generous amount of money which the Government are anxious to spend on improving facilities for industry in central Scotland, would it not be a good contribution to get rid of the irritation of tolls altogether and make this a continuation of the roads running from north to south?

Mr. Noble: I quite agree that, inevitably, there is some irritation in having to pay tolls. But there is the counterbalancing argument that we get considerably more money for our roads if we get some of the more expensive items paid for in this way. Regarding industry, it may interest the House to know that since we last discussed this matter at Question Time seven new firms and four firms in Fife have extended their premises. This seems to me to indicate that Government policy is not holding up development, very important as it is, in this area.

Regional Crime Squads

Mr. Dempsey: sked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will consult chief constables with a view to establishing a regional crime squad for Scotland.

Mr. Noble: I do not think I would be justified in suggesting a crime squad

to cover the whole of Scotland. The regional arrangements in the West of Scotland are well known; appropriate arrangements exist elsewhere, and chief constables generally know that they can readily obtain assistance from larger forces, but I shall of course consider any recommendation about crime squads that may be made by the Home Office Police Research and Planning Unit.

Mr. Dempsey: Is not it nonsensical that the Secretary of State should be allowed to get away with that argument, especially when within the last few weeks a committee of experts has advised the formation of regional crime squads for the United Kingdom as a whole? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the mind of the criminal knows no geographical barrier and that the regional crime squad to which he referred is limited. Is not it about time we had a Scotland, Yard for Scotland—[Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."]—which could be made available to chief constables on request in order to improve criminal detection techniques?

Mr. Noble: All this is interesting, but I think that we should wait until the Home Office Police Research and Planning Unit, which is considering the problem, has produced its recommendations.

Special Housing Association (Rents)

Mr. Dempsey: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will give a direction to the Scottish Special Housing Association to postpone contemplated rent increases for 1964, in view of recent and substantial increases to Scottish Special Housing Association tenants.

Mr. Noble: No, Sir.

Mr. Dempsey: Has the Secretary of State borne in mind that over the last three years the tenants of the Scottish Special Housing Association houses have paid increases in rents totalling £500,000? Does he realise that needy characters are no longer able to pay the rents of the houses? Is he aware that at the present time the Committee in Scotland is considering increasing the rent by another £12? Does the Minister believe that this is fair, especially in those areas where there is a hard core of


unemployment and where the rent rebate schemes of this association are in no way effective?

Mr. Noble: I am absolutely satisfied that the S.S.H.A. rents are reasonable and that the operation of their rent rebate scheme is satisfactory. As the hon. Gentleman probably knows, the rent rebate scheme starts where wages are below £13 10s. a week.

Land Prices

Mr. W. Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he will introduce legislation to ensure that the gain from rising land prices in many areas of Scotland consequent on current developments does not accrue wholly to landowners.

Mr. Noble: No, Sir.

Mr. Hamilton: Is the Minister aware that, according to a letter sent to me by the Minister of State and dated 14th October, land in the Fort William area, which cost £67 an acre before development, is now costing £750 per acre for housing? In view of the statement made by the Minister of Housing and Local Government about the form of nationalisation he is to introduce, may I ask whether the right hon. Gentleman can say what form of public ownership and development of land is to be introduced by him during the current Session?

Mr. Noble: It is true that ten years ago, when there was no development in the area, the figure for land, in one or two cases, was as low as £67 an acre. Since then it has risen from between £100 and £550, and at its present level it is roughly comparable with prices paid by county councils and small burghs all over Scotland.

Mr. Ross: Surely the development that has taken place and the increase in the value of this land is due to public expenditure and public enterprise? Are we to understand from the right hon. Gentleman that he has produced a grandiose plan for central Scotland which, if carried out, would lead to a greatly enhanced value for this land, but that he is prepared to see this enhanced value go to private landlords who have done nothing about it? Why does not he do something for Scotland?

Mr. Noble: The hon. Gentleman talks about land being increased in value by Government effort. It is perfectly true that in the Fort William area the Government played an important part—

Mr. Ross: Ten million pounds.

Mr. Noble: It was £10 million out of £18 million, or perhaps a little more. But the Government effort was only part of it, and a great deal of the development, I am glad to say, was due to private industry. In these matters I am certain that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government—who spoke about this in the House a day or two ago—is right. The way to maintain the amount of land we need for building is to see that there is plenty of it available.

Mr. Hamilton: Is the right hon. Gentleman prepared to agree with the principle enunciated by the Minister of Housing and Local Government, that where land prices increase as the result of betterment by public enterprise, the increase in value should be channelled into public coffers and not private pockets? If the right hon. Gentleman does not accept that, then clearly there is a difference between the policy enunciated by himself and that enunciated by the English Minister.

Mr. Noble: I always agree with my colleague the Minister of Housing and Local Government.

Mr. Hamilton: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I wish to give notice that I shall endeavour to raise the matter on the Adjournment.

Municipal Houses

Mr. Manuel: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how many municipal houses were built in Scotland in each year from 1952 to 1962.

Mr. Noble: The total number of houses built by local authorities was 244,661, and by other public agencies 55,189. I shall, with permission, circulate figures for each year in the Official Report.

Mr. Manuel: Would not the Secretary of State agree that the figures regarding completions given last week by the Prime Minister were misleading in relation to


Scotland? Would he agree that while in 1957 24,000 municipal houses were built, by 1962 this figure had dropped to 16,000? Is he aware that in 1957 completions from all sources amounted to 32,000 and that by 1962 that figure had dropped to 26,000? While it is generally agreed that we have some of the worst housing conditions in Western Europe, is not it a terrible thing that these figures should drop by approximately 6,000 over the period which I have indicated?

Mr. Noble: I think it a pity that the figures dropped. But the hon. Gentleman knows very well that during the last two years local authorities have

Year
Local Authorities
S.S.H.A.
New Towns Development Corporations
Government Departments
Total by all public agencies


1952
…
…
22,393
4,745
485
797
28,420


1953
…
…
29,719
4,957
1,316
946
36,938


1954
…
…
29,748
4,117
1,466
799
36,130


1955
…
…
24,210
3,745
1,323
1,137
30,415


1956
…
…
22,084
3,133
1,073
887
27,177


1957
…
…
24,239
3,136
951
493
28,819


1958
…
…
22,620
3,277
1,474
643
28,016


1959
…
…
18,665
2,493
1,551
348
23,057


1960
…
…
17,913
2,071
1,519
433
21,936


1961
…
…
16,823
1,453
1,265
489
20,030


1962
…
…
16,245
967
1,576
124
18,912


Total
…
…
244,661
34,094
13,999
7,096
299,850

Children (Emigration)

The following Questions stood upon the Order Paper:

Dr. DICKSON MABON: To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland how many children in the care of local authorities have been sent overseas under emigration schemes since the passing of the Children Act 1948.

Dr. DICKSON MABON: To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland how many children in the care of local authorities have been sent overseas under emigration schemes where the parents or guardians had indicated their opposition when consulted under the provisions of the Children Act 1948.

Dr. Mabon: With permission, Mr. Speaker, may I ask Questions No. 33 and No. 34 together?

Mr. Noble: I shall, with permission, answer Questions No. 33 and No. 34 together.

been concentrating largely on slum clearance schemes and redevelopment. This is a slower business than building houses on vacant land. It is significant that there are now 7,600 more local authority houses under construction than there were a year ago and of the 45,646 houses under construction at the end of September over 31,000 were for local authorities.

Mr. Ross: Will the right hon. Gentleman use his influence to make Tory posters in Scotland read that we are replacing the slums at the rate of 40 a day?

Following are the figures:

Since the passing of the Act consent has been given to the emigration under emigration schemes of 36 children in the care of local authorities in Scotland. In no such case has consent been given where the parents or guardians were known to oppose the child's emigration.

School Building Programme

Sir M. Galpern: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether, in view of the Government's policy of pressing forward with measures to provide for a rising school population and to improve the standard of school education, he will authorise local authorities whose school building programmes were cut earlier this year to proceed with their lists of projects as originally submitted to him.

Mr. Noble: No, Sir. The programmes originally submitted by education authorities for the current year proposed collectively far more work than could


have been undertaken, but the programmes I approved are permitting investment in school building to continue at a very high level.

Sir M. Galpern: How can the right hon. Gentleman's reply be reconciled with the reply he gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Dunbartonshire, West (Mr. Steele) on 24th April when he indicated that if he
had enough money to enable every education department to start all the work it wanted to do immediately, this would be a different problem."—[Official Report, 24th April, 1963; Vol. 676, c. 208.]
Is he aware that Glasgow and Edinburgh, and now Perth and Kinross, are protesting to the Scottish Education Department about the savage and shameless cuts in education expenditure?

Mr. Noble: It would certainly have made a difference because one or two local authorities—the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton) knows one—could have spent more money. It is none the less true that very few additional projects that I am aware of could hive been started. In Glasgow, where we gave an allocation of £2,500,000, the authority had to make adjustments to keep abreast of this programme and, so far as I can discover at the moment, will achieve it only by March of next year.

Mr. Bence: In view of the promise we have had through the White Paper for the development of central Scotland and increasing investment in social amenities, will the right hon. Gentleman immediately issue an order that local authorities such as Dunbartonshire which have had their school building programmes cut—it would be an amenity for the population if the amounts cut were restored—should go ahead with the social investment of education for children?

Mr. Noble: What we are endeavouring to do is to see that any extra expenditure goes to areas where growth is expected, and there are some areas in Dunbartonshire which I hope will be helped.

Oral Answers to Questions — ROYAL AIR FORCE AND ROYAL NAVY (AIRCRAFT REPLACEMENTS)

The following Questions stood upon the Order Paper:

Sir J. EDEN: To ask the Minister of Defence whether it is still his intention to equip the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy with a British all-weather vertical take-off and landing fighter aircraft; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. J. CRONIN: To ask the Minister of Defence if it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government to continue to develop the Hawker P 1154 aircraft for both the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force; and if it is intended to modify this programme by purchasing foreign aircraft for the Royal Navy.

Mr. HEALEY: To ask the Minister of Defence if he will make a statement on Her Majesty's Government's plans for the P 1154 supersonic vertical takeoff strike fighter project.

The Minister of Defence (Mr. Peter Thorneycroft): With permission, I will now answer Questions Nos. 68, 69 and 70 together.
The problem of meeting the RA.F.'s requirement for a Hunter replacement, and the Navy's requirement for a Sea Vixen replacement, is under examination. A project study aimed at meeting both these requirements with a version of the P 1154 has run into difficulties. This study and its implications are under consideration by the Weapons Development Committee.
No decision has yet been taken, and I shall not be in a position to make any statement on the matter until I have examined in far more detail than has so far been possible the technical and financial considerations involved. This is likely to take some weeks.

Sir J. Eden: In view of the high hopes which have long centred on the development of a joint aircraft for the two Services, and since British industry and technological skill have for so long held the world lead in development of V.T.O.L. capabilities, would it not be deplorable if we were now required to buy an American aircraft?

Mr. Thorneycroft: My hon. Friend must not make any assumptions about what we would or would not buy. Our present task is to examine in detail, and with great care, these project studies, because it is this machinery which makes possible the proper control of defence expenditure.

Mr. Cronin: Can the right hon. Gentleman say why those difficulties were not foreseen when he made his enthusiastic statement to the House on 30th July?

Mr. Thorneycroft: The statement was that we would start a project study and the object of a project study is to identify difficulties of this kind.

Mr. Healey: Does not the Minister recall telling the House on 30th July, as reported in column 237 of Hansard of that date, first, that a decision on a common aircraft had been made, and, secondly, that the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force had reached agreement on the characteristics of a common aircraft? Can he tell the House what is the point of the much publicised integration ofthe Service staffs if the Minister of Defence either has not the guts to impose his will on quarrelling subordinates, or not the wit to see that he is being "taken for a ride"?

Mr. Thorneycroft: That is an extraordinarily facile approach to serious defenceproblems and seriously underestimates the quality of the men serving on the staffs in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. These men have made, and are making, a serious effort to develop a joint aircraft. If, in the process of an extraordinarily difficult technical job of this kind, a project study shows certain differences, that is why we have a project study. Unless we are prepared to work this machinery of feasibility studies, project studies, and the rest, very large sums of money will be wasted.

Commander Courtney: Is my right hon. Friend aware that there is a slightly wider issue involved? In the absence of a surface-to-surface guided missile for the Royal Navy the fixed-wing aircraft remains the principal weapon in surface combat of naval warships. Will he bear this in mind in view of the fact that the Royal Navy must have the best aircraft for its own specific purpose?

Mr. Thorneycroft: That is certainly one of the considerations I have very much in mind.

Mr. Wigg: Leaving aside the right hon. Gentleman's statement on 30th July, how comes it that, in the Air Estimates, paragraph 14 states quite categorically that it has been decided that the replacement of the Hunter should be based on the Hawker P 1154? Will he tell us whether this is a lack of patriotism on his part, and that he has now to face the fact, or that these comments are reserved only for right hon. Members on this side of the House when they discover the truth?

Mr. Thorneycroft: The House should understand and appreciate, particularly hon. Members who criticise from time to time expenditure on aircraft, that a series of very carefully planned examinations have to be made on every aircraft that is put forward. We do not go into full-scale production or development of an aircraft until these studies are complete. The object of these studies is to identify difficulties in advance before the expenditure takes place. This is the procedure we are going through and I intend that it should be completed before committing the Government or the country to very expensive aircraft.

Mr. P. Williams: To help the House to get this matter into right proportion, can my right hon. Friend say whether this is the sort of normal technical problem which comes up with the development of any new aircraft? If that is so, surely it is merely a check to the programme rather than a complete halt to it? If that is true, what effort is being made, together with our N.A.T.O. allies, to get them to accept the same specification and to buy this aircraft in due course?

Mr. Thorneycroft: I sympathise with that point, but there is hardly such a thing as a normal technical difficulty, because they all differ very much. These are substantial problems, because the whole problem of a vertical take-off aircraft, let alone one which will be suitable for the Royal Navy as well as the Royal Air Force, is a very difficult undertaking. I am not oblivious to this question, or to the possibility of joint European or other requirements.

Mr. Shinwell: After the project study has beer, completed, who will take final decision? Will it be Lord Mountbatten, or the right hon. Gentleman, who should remind himself from time to time that he is, in effect, a political chief?

Mr. Thorneycroft: The decision will be a decision of Her Majesty's Government.

Mr. Healey: No one under-estimates the appalling difficulties involved in designing the sort of aircraft to which the right hon. Gentleman refers, and no one on this side of the House would disregard the need for very careful study of the financial implications, but if these difficulties had not been examined on 30th July why did he ask leave of the House on 30th July to make a special statement that the decision had been taken to produce a common aircraft? It now appears that the two Services had not even agreed on whether the crew should comprise one or two men.

Mr. Thorneycroft: The hon. Member's recollection is not quite correct. I made a statement on the future of the Fleet Air Arm and the carrier. At that time it is true that a joint operational requirement on this matter and a study had been set in hand. On the face of it, so far as could be judged by men very well technically qualified to judge, there was a reasonable hope that this aircraft would be developed in a joint rôle. There are, as the project study has shown, substantial difficulties which have arisen in that. This is not unusual or necessarily unexpected. These things do happen in the development of aircraft.
All I say is that I cannot be pressed to produce, or authorise the production of, some aircraft—or even two aircraft, one for the R.A.F. and one for the Royal Navy—without going through these processes of study, project study and examination by the Weapons Development Committee. I hope that the House, whichis charged with some control over public expenditure and the Estimates, will support me in this attitude.

GENERAL DELGADO (VISA)

Mrs. Hart: (by Private Notice) asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department why he has refused a visa to enter this country to General Delgado and if he will reconsider his decision.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Henry Brooke): In the light of General Delgado's activities in this country during his last visit, when he came for the stated purpose ofa lecture tour but, in the event, advocated armed insurrection against the Government of his own country, I decided that I would not be justified in authorising a fresh visa.

Mrs. Hart: Does not the Home Secretary agree that it is totally in conflict withBritish tradition and practice to refuse permission to enter this country to a distinguished foreign opposition leader such as General Delgado, who holds the C.B.E.? Has he considered the effects of this on African opinion, since I understand that various heads of Commonwealth African Governments are to see him in Africa? Was this reason given to General Delgado himself when our Ambassador in Brazil talked to him recently?

Mr. Brooke: Naturally, I took everything into consideration, but I would say to the hon. Lady that hospitality imposes on the recipient of that hospitality an obligation not to indulge in political activity which will embarrass his host. That is what he did last time, and that appeared to me to be a compelling reason for me not to offer him a new visa.

Mr. Gordon Walker: Does the right hon. Gentleman realise that this decision is causing, and will cause, a great deal of concern—concern which will not be allayed by reports that the Prime Minister made this decision personally? May I ask whether the general is asking for a transfer visa to pass on to other places? Will he bear in mind that this decision is bound to create the impression that we are worried about attacking or appearing to criticise Portuguese colonial policy and that it will have, and is having, a deplorable effect upon Commonwealth opinion in a number of very important Commonwealth countries?

Mr. Brooke: First, this was my decision, for which I take full responsibility. I have given the reasons for it. General Delgado is a self-declared rebel against a Government with which we are allied. There is no reason why he should not travel to Africa or any other part of the world, but I decided that it would not be right to offer him a fresh visa to come here in the light of what he did when he was here last time.

Mr. Brockway: Even if Portugal is an ally of this country, is it not a dictatorship? When a country is a dictatorship, is not a political expression against it justifiable in our democracy when it would not be justifiable against another democracy?

Mr. Brooke: It does not seem to me right for me to give visas to come to this country to people who when they have come before have, despite their ostensible reason for coming, advocated armed insurrection against their own Governments.

Mr. A. Henderson: Did General Delgado make a speech advocating some violent action against his Government or was he seeking to purchase arms? Are there not many instances of people in this country advocating armed insurrection against Her Majesty's Government without it being regarded as anything more than a political extravagance?

Mr. Brooke: That may be a domestic matter, but in this case it was a foreigner who came to this country. I do not know whether he sought to purchase arms, but he certainly made inflammatory speeches advocating armed action against the Government of his own country, and in those circumstances I do not think that it is right to offer the same person a second opportunity.

Mr. Doughty: Does the Home Secretary realise that his very correct decision will give great satisfaction to the vast majority of the people of this country, who do not wish to see this country used for the purpose of inflammatory propaganda against friendly nations?

Mr. S. Silverman: May I remind the right hon. Gentleman that in recent months he made a very strong stand in

order to persuade this House that questions of political asylum concern foreigners and foreigners alone? That was the whole point, was it not, in the case of Chief Enahoro, and the objections which we made? Does he not appreciate that the practice of political asylum of which this country has rightly been proud for a very long time would be utterly unworkable on the right hon. Gentleman's principle that political asylum cannot be granted and a foreigner cannot be admitted if he is in revolt against the Government of his own country?

Mr. Brooke: The hon. Member is wholly astray. The question of political asylum does not arise. General Delgado is in Brazil and there is no risk to him in Brazil whatever.

Mr. H. Wilson: May I ask whether the right hon. Gentleman consulted the Foreign Office in this matter and what advice he got from them? Is he aware that because of the Government's very long record of appearing to support Portugal against those of the Portuguese colonies in Africa which seek freedom and independence, this further decision, taken against that background, will have a very serious effect on Britain's name with a large number of African countries and a large number of members of the United Nations?

Mr. Brooke: Nevertheless, I have no doubt whatever that the decision was right.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. We have a lot to do and we cannot continue on this subject.

Mrs. Hart: On a point of order. May Igive notice that I shall seek to raise this matter on the Adjournment at the earliest possible moment.

LONDON TRANSPORT ROAD SERVICES (REVIEW OF PAY AND CONDITIONS)

The Minister of Labour (Mr. J. B. Godber): The Government have considered the situation arising from the claim for increased pay and improved working conditions for the operating


staff of the London Transport Board's road services, and the difficulties the Board is facing in the manning of these services. The Government have decided that there is a need for a comprehensive review of pay and conditions in the light of the problems facing public road transport in the London area.
For this purpose the Minister of Transport and I are jointly appointing a Committee of Inquiry. The terms of reference are:
To review the pay and conditions of employment of the drivers and conductors of the London Transport Board's road services in the light of the Board's manpower requirements for those services, the Board's statutory responsibilities, the working and operating conditions in London traffic, and the likely repercussions of any changes on other employments paying due regard to the possibilities of increasing the efficiency of London Transport's road services and to the considerations affecting national economic growth; and to report.
I am glad to say that Professor E. H. Phelps Brown has agreed to act as Chairman of the Committee. I hope to announce the names of the other members shortly.
The London Transport Board and the Transport and General Workers' Union have been informed of the Committee's appointment.
The Minister of Transport and I want the Committee to open its inquiries at a very early date and to complete them as soon as the scope of their remit allows. This being so, the Government expect that there will in the meantime be a return to normal working.

Mr. Gunter: I am sure that the whole House will welcome the step which has been taken to bring to an end the appalling mess in London. I would only say that I have the belief that the busmen of London will respond, even though they have suffered injustice for far too long, in the hope that at long last justice will be done to them. I have the belief that they will now respond as the Minister has suggested.
There are two or three questions which I should like briefly to ask the Minister. The first is the important question whether the conclusions of this Committee of Inquiry will become the subject of discussion and agreement within the normal machinery of negotiation which exists between the unions and the London Transport Board. Secondly, it is my impression, and the impression of

many other people, that the London Transport Board has for a long time recognised the justice of the men's claims and has been unable to rectify this situation, although it wanted to, because of the Government's attitude. I should like the Minister to comment on that impression, which many of us have.
Thirdly, in view of the bitterness which is abroad in London, can the Minister say how long the inquiry will take? Can we expect a very early report indeed? If not, I fear that the sense of justice of the men will become even more inflamed.

Mr. Godber: I am very grateful for the hon. Gentleman's first words. On the question of timing, I know that Professor Phelps Brown is aware of the need to report as early as he possibly can. I remind the hon. Gentleman of the wide terms of reference, which I believe are necessary to enable the Committee to look at the matter properly. However, I want to see the report just as soon as it is possible to get it.
As to the conclusions becoming the subject of discussion through the normal channels, we must await the report and see what the conclusions are and not prejudge them. But I shall ensure that the conclusions are made public so that the House can judge the position itself.
The position of London Transport is the same as that of all nationalised industries in this respect. These industries are aware of the Government's general attitude to these maters. This is merely the normal position.

Sir R. Thompson: Can my right hon. Friend assure us that the terms of reference will be sufficiently wide to enable the Committee of Inquiry to go into all the problems now facing London road transport?

Mr. Godber: Yes, Sir; that is a fact. The Government recognise their obligations in this matter. I and my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport are seeking to establish a Committee with a wide membership. When I am able to announce the other names, I am sure that it will be clear that we attach importance to this aspect.

Mr. Holt: Is the Committee of Inquiry expected to delve for quite new information of its own? Four or five


points raised in the terms of reference refer to matters which are widely and intimately known already by London Transport. If the Committee is to delve for new information, does it not mean that the inquiry will take a long time and that we shall not get the report until well after Christmas?

Mr. Godber: I cannot say precisely how long it will take. I cannot add to what I have said in that respect. I think what is proposed is sound, and I would point out that the London Transport Board also welcomes the idea of a body of this kind being set up so that we can get a full picture of the position.

Mr. Dudley Smith: Can my right hon. Friend say whether the inquiry will cover in scope the management and full operational side of London Transport? For a long time thousands of Londoners have felt that there was something seriously wrong with both the management and the operation of the labour force.

Mr. Godber: I read out the terms of reference and drew attention to the fact that the Committee will be looking at the problem of increasing the efficiency of the London Transport road services. I think that the width of the terms of reference give the Committee ample opportunity to do that.

Mr. Gunter: Further to the question which I put to the right hon. Gentleman about the impressions which are abroad, can he tell us on what date London Transport submitted its conclusions on this matter to the Minister? How many weeks ago was it? Secondly, arising from previous questions, in view of the possibility of a long delay, or some delay, is there a possibility of having an interim report which might relate to pay and conditions?

Mr. Godber: In reply to the first point, my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport has been in touch with the London Transport Board on a number of occasions in relation to this matter. Without notice, I could not give the exact date. As to the question of an interim report, I think that we had better leave it to see how the Committee gets on with its inquiry.

NEW WRIT (DUMFRIES)

Motion made, and Question proposed,

That Mr. Speaker do issue his Warrant to the Clerk of the Crown to make out a new Writ for the electing ofa Member to serve in this present Parliament for Dumfries in the room of the Rt. Hon. Niall Malcolm Stewart Macpherson, called up to the House of Peers.—[Mr. Redmayne.]

3.48 p.m.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: The House should give a little further consideration to this Motion and think a little of the electors of the constituency. I have had certain opinions given to me about the date of this by-election. I represent the adjoining constituency of South Ayrshire. The Dumfries constituency is onevery like the South Ayrshire constituency. It is a very large scattered agricultural constituency containing a very large number of villages. It is not like St. Marylebone. It is a very much more difficult thing to fight an agricultural constituency than a constituency in London. I suggest that it would be advisable for the Government, after listening to the representations which I make, to postpone the Dumfries by-election until after the Christmas Recess.

Mr. Cyril Bence: Until after the lambing season.

Mr. Hughes: Several considerations have to be borne in mind. One is that the Conservative candidate has only just been adopted and is a stranger to the constituency. However much the Government may want to see the Solicitor-General for Scotland in this House, there is not such a great overwhelming anxiety on the part of the electors of Dumfries. It is quite understandable that the Government should want to see the Solicitor-General for Scotland in the House after the very long period when we have been without one here. However, if another earl had wished to resign his peerage and contest a seat for the House of Commons, I doubt very much whether the Solicitor-General would have had this chance.
But that is not the point. The point is whether great constituencies are to be bartered about at the convenience of


the Government machine. The situation here is that this very scattered constituency wants to see what kind of a Member it shall have. There are already four candidates in the field, and it is reasonable that the electors should have the opportunity of seeing and testing the calibre of every possible candidate. The people of Dumfries have grave doubts whether they should elect the Solicitor-General for Scotland without finding out his views on important questions of the day. Naturally, the Solicitor-General for Scotland will want to explain, for example, the housing policy of the Government in all the innumerable villages, especially those where there are no houses—[Laughter.]—no municipal houses. I use the term "municipal houses"because in many of those villages the houses which are not municipal cannot come under the designation of houses at all.
Here is a constituency where housing has been one of the biggest controversial problems in the last year. Hon. Members who attend the Scottish Grand Committee—I am quite sure that the Prime Minister will be pleased to go there, when he is called—know that the Dumfriesshire housing problem has caused great concern from Kirkconnel in the north to Lockerbie in the south. Not only will the Conservative candidate have to go to innumerable meetings, but he will have to canvass. I submit that it is in the interests of the electors and of the candidates that they should have the fullest opportunity of meeting each other.
With the very small number of village halls in the area, it is difficult to arrange for the electors to hear the different candidates. It would not be good enough for the Conservative candidate to rush in and spend three, four, or five minutes in speaking and then dash off under the assumption that he has converted the electorate. From the point of view of geography alone I believe that the people of Dumfries are entitled to know something about the candidates; they are not prepared to vote for a pig in a poke.
I cannot conceive that the Conservative candidate, although he is a very able advocate and Solicitor-General, can possibly convert between now and Christmas the very large number of

people who are up in arms against the increase of rents. I do not see any reason for rushing the by-election before Christmas. This is a period of the year when there is snow on the hills of Dumfriesshire and there are climatic as well as geographical difficulties. I therefore suggest that the Conservative candidate will not have time before the by-election to go round all those housing estates and appease all the people who are indignant because Dumfriesshire now has the highest municipal rents in Scotland.
I do not wish the Conservative candidate to be under a disadvantage. The other candidates are all electors in the constituency and have an advantage over him. There is far more political acumen and political judgment in Dumfriesshire than there is in Kinross. The people there are not so easily satisfied. Although the Solicitor-General for Scotland is familiar with the legal problems of Scotland, he is not known in the constituency, and the people want to see him. The Labour, Liberal and Scottish Nationalist candidates all live in Dumfries and the people are familiar with them, but they do not know anything about the Conservative candidate and they look upon him as somebody just dumped down by the Conservative headquarters in Edinburgh against the will of the local people. As I say, we do not want the Conservative candidate to be at a disadvantage. We want him to have fair play. We want the constituency to see him and him to see the constituency.
I have tried to discover the Government's point of view. Can it be argued that there is anxiety to get the Solicitor-General for Scotland into the House of Commons before Christmas because of the legal advice which he can give? It may be said that I am one who is always advocating that the Solicitor-General for Scotland should be available for questioning by the Scottish Grand Committee. But we have done without him for about three years and I cannot understand why there should be haste to bring him here when he is operating already. If the Government were anxious to get the Solicitor-General for Scotland into this House to serve the Scottish Grand Committee and the House, they could have sent him to Kinross or Marylebone.
I should be the last to see my neighbouring constituency without a Member because some of the aggrieved constituents of the former Member write to me. However, I am prepared to look after their interests. The House, having been in recess for a considerable time, is now meeting and will shortly rise for the Christmas Recess. Therefore, the elected Member for Dumfries cannot possibly be here much before Christmas and then the House does not sit again until 14th January.
I do not want to see this by-election delayed very long, but it would not inflict any hardship on the constituency if the Government were to say, "We will give the constituency the benefit of the doubt on this occasion and think of the electors first". In view of the arguments which I have put forward, I hope that the Leader of the House—I know that he is a very reasonable person and is open to conviction—will say that the Government will postpone this by-election so that the electors have the necessary opportunity to find out all about their candidates and what they stand for before they come ultimately to their decision.

4.8 p.m.

The Lord Privy Seal (Mr. Selwyn Lloyd): I have listened with close attention, as I am sure everyone has, to the entertaining and interesting speech of the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes).
The hon. Member talked about seats being bartered about. I have been

equipped with one or two precedents. When Lord Williams, Mr. Tom Williams as he then was, applied for the Chiltern Hundreds on 1st March, 1948, the Writ was moved on 3rd March, 1948, two days later. When Colonel Morris, as he then was, one of the Sheffield Members, who later became Lord Morris of Kenwood, was moved up to the House of Lords by the party opposite to make a seat available to the right hon. and learned Member for Newport (Sir F. Soskice), then Solicitor-General, he was appointed to the Manor of Northstead on 20th March, 1950, and the Writ was moved on 21st March, 1950.
In this case the elevation to the House of Lords of the former Member for Dumfries was announced on 20th October, the Writ has been moved today, 20th November, and the by-election will be about 12th December. In all the circumstances, that is not an unreasonable period.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Is the right hon. and learned Gentleman aware that the two constituencies which he has quoted are industrial constituencies, not scattered agricultural constituencies?

Mr. Lloyd: That is why I think a longer period is quite reasonable. I should not strike a rather partisan note on this occasion, but I am very encouraged by the hon. Member's opposition to this Motion. This indication of nervousness about quick appeals to the electorate is distinctly encouraging.

Question put and agreed to.

Orders of the Day — INDUSTRIAL TRAINING BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

4.10 p.m.

The Minister of Labour (Mr. J. B. Godber): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
The object of the Bill is greatly to improve training in industry and commerce through the establishment of industrial training boards. The Bill gives effect to the proposals set out in the White Paper presented by my predecessor in December last year. I am sure that the House will join me in paying a tribute to my noble Friend, who brought a striking new sense of purpose to the activities of the Ministry of Labour. It is to his positive approach and to his drive and initiative that the Bill owes its origin and its presence here as the first Bill to be debated in this Session of Parliament.
In giving credit to my predecessor, I welcome and endorse this legacy which I have received from him. It is a privilege to take charge of the Bill in its passage to the Statute Book. I say this because I equally am convinced of the need for better industrial training and I look upon this as fitting completely into the pattern of modernisation for which my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has called.
By improving and, in particular, by raising the general level of training in industry, we will be providing greater opportunity and security for those who are trained and a sounder basis for British industry as a whole to competein the markets of the world. That is what we all want.
As this is my first speech in the House as Minister of Labour, I want to say that I look upon my present task as an opportunity to assist both sides of industry to work together ever more closely for their joint benefit and for that of the nation as a whole.
The Bill is an excellent example of what can be done in that direction. Beyond that, however, there are other spheres, too. In particular, there is the important problem of communications within industry, of creating and ensuring greater understanding between employers and unions, between management

and workers. It is oversimplifying the issue to say that the interests of management and workers are always the same, because they are not. The important thing is that it should be seen, and that they should see, that their interests are always complementary rather than divergent, for if they are divergent they hurt each and help neither. A greater recognition of this is needed on both sides and this is a theme to which I shall return on other occasions.
Since the publication of the White Paper, consultations have taken place with a large number of organisations on all sides of industry and also with representatives of interested education organisations. My right hon. Friends and I have been very encouraged by the warm welcome which the proposals have generally received. There have, of course, been differences of opinion on points of detail, and I shall refer to some of these as I go on—I shall be surprised if the hon. Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) does not refer to some of them—but there has been universal agreement with both the aims of the White Paper and the means which it has proposed for achieving them.
In all this, there has been the closest co-operation with the Ministry of Education and with the Scottish Education Department. It could hardly have been otherwise, for further education and industrial training are essentially complementary to each other. It is difficult to draw any hard and fast line between the two. To be fully effective, each needs and must have the full support of the other. The Bill recognises this in the provision that it makes for educational representation on the boards and on the Central Training Council and for the attendance at meetings of the boards of officers of the Ministry of Education and of the Scottish Education Department.
Although the Bill provides that I, as Minister of Labour, shall bear the main responsibility, I need hardly say that in exercising my powers I shall work very closely with my right hon. Friends the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland. This is a joint operation. It is, therefore, particularly appropriate that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education will be winding up the debate this evening, and I propose


to leave him to deal mainly with the education implications that will arise.
The Bill is quite short. It would be wrong to seek to specify in detail in an Act of Parliament the way in which training should be organised throughout the whole of industry. Conditions differ widely between one industry and another and what would be appropriate in one case could be quite unsuitable in another. The Bill therefore provides a broad framework on which the training arrangements best suited to the needs of individual industries can be built.
Clause 1 empowers me to define an industry and to set up a training board for it. Before establishing a board, I shall be required to consult representatives of employers' and workers'organisations in the industry concerned. Following the precedent of the Industrial Organisation and Development Act, 1947, industries will be defined by reference to "activities". This includes commercial as well as industrial activities. The practical effect of this will be that the Minister of Labour will be empowered, although not obliged, to set up training boards to cover not only manufacturing industry, but also such activities as, for instance, retail distribution, catering and banking.
The Bill includes nationalised industries within its scope and it includes local authorities in so far as they or their employees may be engaging in an activity of industry or commerce. It does not apply to the activities of local government as such, nor does it apply to the Crown. I shall say more about that later.
If a firm is engaged in a variety of activities coming within the definition of more than one industry, it will be possible to secure that for the purposes of the Bill each of the various establishments of the firm belongs to one industry only and pays a levy to only one board. If this were done, a separate engineering maintenance establishment, for example, of a large firm primarily engaged in, say, the chemical industry might come within the scope of the engineering board. If, on the other hand, a firm in the chemical industry employed only a few maintenance fitters, these men could come within the scope of the chemical industry board. There must be flexibility. Clearly, there

will be difficulty over lines of demarcation and we must have sufficient flexibility to bring all those working in an establishment within one board or another.
The composition of the training boards is set out in the Schedule to the Bill. All the members of the boards will be appointed by the Minister, although before appointing employer and worker members I shall be required to consult the appropriate organisations on the two sides of the industry. In appointing the education members, I shall have to consult my colleagues the Education Ministers.
Beyond specifying that there shall be an equal number of employer and worker members, the Schedule deliberately says nothing about actual numbers. It would be a mistake to specify in the Bill that boards should be all of the same size. It will, however, be my aim to keep boards as small as possible, although in some industries they will obviously need to be larger than in others.
By way of illustration, the general pattern which I have in mind is that if a board were to consist of fourteen members, five of them would be employers' representatives, five would be workers' representatives, three would represent the education interests and the fourteenth member would be the chairman, who, according to the Bill, must be someone with industrial or commercial experience. The line which I am taking concerning the chairman is that he could come from another industry, and in most cases it would probably be appropriate that he should. This, however, is not essential. It is a matter that can be settled in relation to any particular board. There will be power to pay the chairman, but the other members of the board will not be paid.
Paragraph 5 of the Schedule provides that neither the chairman nor the education members shall have a vote on matters relating to the imposition of a levy. This is important. The employers in the industries will have to pay the levy. The workers in it will be directly affected by the decisions of the board. Both the British Employers' Confederation and the Trades Union Congress have argued that decisions on the imposition of a levy should be taken only by those members of the board who have a direct interest


and responsibility within the industry. My colleagues and I have thought it right to accept this view.
I have said that there will be equal numbers of employers' and workers'representatives on the board. This means that it will be possible for a deadlock to arise over the proposals to be made in relation to a levy. If this could not be resolved, I call attention to the reserve powers given to the Minister in Clause 7. These could come into operation, but both the British Employers' Confederation and the Trades Union Congress consider that the mere existence of these default powers should be sufficient in almost all cases to ensure that boards reach agreement on this point.
Some fears have been expressed by representatives of education organisations that the words
any matter relating to the imposition ot a levy
in the Schedule might be interpreted by a board so widely as to prevent the education members from having any effective say in the policies pursued by the board. I am advised that on a strict reading these words could not bear so wide an interpretation. I think that those fears are groundless. I would make it clear that it is certainly my intention that these members shall have the opportunity to play a full and active part in the deliberations of the boards. I say that deliberately because I want to make this point quite clear.
The White Paper suggested that Government Departments would need to be represented on the boards. I think that it would be more appropriate for them to attend board meetings but not as voting members. The Bill therefore provides that the Minister of Labour, the Minister of Education, the Secretary of State for Scotland, and other Ministers, where I consider this appropriate, may each appoint an officer to attend meetings of a board, but they will not be voting members. So much for the Schedule.
Clause 2 sets out the functions of the boards. A board will have two main duties—to ensure that the amount of training in its industry is sufficient, and to publish recommendations with regard to the nature and the length of training for different occupations and the further

education which should be associated with it. To assist boards to carry out the first of these duties they will be empowered to provide training courses themselves and to enter into contracts of service or apprenticeship with their trainees. It has been suggested that some boards might wish to make themselves responsible for the initial period of training for all apprentices. The Bill will give them power to do this if they so choose. This is the flexibility of the Bill, which I think is important.
Two criticisms have been made of the way in which the second of the two duties to which I referred a moment ago which the Bill places on the boards has been formulated. The first criticism is that too much discretion is left to the boards. It has been suggested, forexample, that the Bill itself ought to specify that no period of apprenticeship should last for more than three years. I have every sympathy with those who think that the length of apprenticeship in many occupations is at this time too long; but there are many complications in this subject, as hon. Members will know. In any case, a statutory provision of this kind will, in my view, be far too rigid. Maximum periods, incidentally, have a habit of becoming minima and I see no point in making "three" a magic figure in place of the present five.
Changing industrial requirements and improved methods of training could well in some cases—I think that we must face this in due course—make even three years too long. Boards will exercise their functions in accordance with proposals submitted to, and approved by, me. I think that this will prove to be a more satisfactory and a more flexible arrangement than to include detailed specifications of this nature in the Bill.
Having indicated that I do not think that this particular problem is one to be met by legislation, I want it to be quite clear that in my view one of the benefits that should flow from the higher standards of training that we seek to establish is a fresh and a more flexible attitude by thoseconcerned towards the whole question of the period of apprenticeship. I very much hope that all those concerned will have a hard new look at their own thinking on this subject and will come to admit that what was


relevant fifty years ago does not necessarily meet the needs of the present time.
The second criticism relates to the use of the word "recommendations". Boards should merely recommend, it has been said: they should have power to insist. I do not think that this argument attaches sufficient weight to the financial arrangements which the board will control. Under the terms of the Bill, employers will be free, as now, to train or not to train, though they will all contribute towards the cost of that training. If they train, they will not be obliged to follow a board's recommendations, for they are only recommendations.
The important point is that any employer who wishes to obtain a grant from a board in respect of training he is providing will have to train in accordance with the standards which the board has set. The financial sanction will be, and it is directly intended to be, a powerful weapon in the board's hands. I stress this point particularly to hon. Members, for it is really the centre of the Bill. I shall revert to it at different stages as we go through our more detailed consideration of the Bill.
The powers of the boards will extend to all occupations in their industries at whatever level. There will be no limit, either up or down, but I want to make it clear that the main purpose of theBill, as I see it, is to improve the supply and the quality of our skilled manpower and it is to this that I shall expect the boards to turn their early attention. The need to improve training for higher management is of first-class importance also; but,though this will not be excluded from the scope of the boards I think that most people would agree that the major contribution will have to be made by other agencies—though the boards may, for example, be able to help with the financing of such training. In considering the training of technicians and higher technical grades, the boards will need to work closely with the appropriate professional institutions and tc seek their advice.
The Clause requires boards in publishing recommendations to deal with the question of—
the persons by …whom the training ought to be given".

This provision seems certain to lead to an increased demand for trained instructors. As the House knows, my Department has for many years now been running residential courses for instructors at its Instructor Training College at Letchworth. We have now increased the number of places available at Letchworth from 500 to 800 a year. We have also opened a new training college with 300 places a year in Glasgow.
The Bill will also increase the demand for industrial training officers—that is, men capable of planning and organising training at all levels. The British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education has this year organised two courses for training officers. Wide publicity was given to them, yet the first one had to run at half strength and the second had to be cancelled for lack of support. I am, frankly, disappointed at this. Training officers will be in short supply, and any firm that already has them will start off with a marked advantage. Further courses are being planned, and I most strongly urge firms to take full advantage of them.
Clause 3 will enable boards, in accordance with proposals approved by me, to delegate to committees any of the functions conferred on them under Clause 2. If boards are to be kept small, a power of delegation is obviously essential. Some boards, particularly in the larger industries, may wish to set up what one might call sub-boards to deal with particular sections of their industry. Most boards will no doubt find it convenient to delegate to specialist panels the work of preparing training syllabuses for particular occupations. Because the same occupations are to be found in different industries, some boards will need to work together in drawing up such syllabuses, and the Bill will enable them to set up joint committees for this purpose.
It has been suggested that there is no mention in the Bill of any local consideration in the planning of industrial training. Clearly, the boards, in determining the training needs of their industries and in deciding how these needs are to be met, will have to take the particular requirements of different parts of the country into account. I think that this is essential. Under


Clause 3 they will be able to set up regional or local committees. I think that this is also very important. Except in those industries which are largely confined to one particular part of the country, I would think it is essential that they should do so. That fits into the concept of the regional problems that we are facing in our work. I do not see how an engineering board, for example, could function properly without a fairly extensive network of regional or local committees, as the board thinks fit.
Clause 4 deals with the levy. The purpose of the levy is to ensure that sufficient funds are available to enable the industry's training requirements to be met; to provide, through the levy-grant system, an incentive to employers to train, and to do so to standards set by the board; and to redistribute the costs of training more fairly throughout the industry. This, of course, is the centre of the provisions of the Bill. Each board vrill be required to submit to me proposals for imposing a levy on employers in its industry.
The White Paper commented that
There would have to be power to exclude from the levy firms below a certain size,
The purpose of this was to relieve boards of the obligation to collect a levy from the very smallest firms, if it was likely to prove prohibitively expensive to do so. The suggestion that some firms might be excluded has been widely criticised, and I understand the reason for it. It has been said that equity demands that all who benefit from training should be required to pay, no matter how much it costs to collect.
I am quite sure that the boards will bear the strength of this feeling in mind in framing their proposals, just as I shall in considering them. But I have taken the view that it would be unnecessarily restrictive riot to give this power to exclude employers from payment if circumstances made this desirable and if a board so wished to do.
I want to make clear that occasions could obviously arise where it would be highly embarrassing not to have this power. The point I am making is that, although it will not necessarily be used by all boards, yet the power will be very necessary in relation to certain boards dealing with very small employers

of labour. The provision is there, and it will be for the boards to decide what to do in each case. It will be for the boards to propose the basis on which the levy is to be assessed and the way it is to be collected.
The British Employers' Confederation has urged strongly that different bases for assessing the levy might suit different industries and that the Bill should not specify a single universal system. I think that this is right. The Bill follows the precedent set by the Industrial Organisation and Development Act in this respect.
If I approve of a board's proposal, the Bill provides that I shall make a levy order accordingly. The order would be required to give employers assessed to a levy the right of appeal to a tribunal which will be appointed under the provisions of Clause 12. On the advice of the Council on Tribunals, the appointment and procedure of tribunals are to be provided for in regulations and not in the Bill itself.
My intention is that each tribunal should consist of three members. The chairman will be selected from a panel of legally qualified chairmen appointed by the Lord Chancellor, or, in Scotland, the Lord President of the Court of Session. The two other members will be appointed from panels of employers' and workers' representatives.
The Government are determined that training schemes for specific industries shall be speedily and vigorously launched, and will not allow lack of finance to stand in the way. The Government will expect a corresponding effort from industry, and to encourage this have it in mind that their contribution to the expenses of the industrial training boards shall be related in some way to their effective outlay. The precise arrangements will be discussed with the boards as soon as they are set up, and until this has been done it is not possible to forecast the rate at which the money provided for in the Bill will be spent.
The imposition of a levy and the provision of financial assistance by the Government represents the two-tier financial system on which the success of the new arrangements depends. An individual employer will be able to obtain a grant from a board only if the training he provides measures up to the


standards the board has set. The financial assistance which the Government will give to the boards will be aimed to ensure that the standards set by the boards are high. There are those two deliberate checks on standards.
In view of the uncertainty surrounding the rate at which Government money will be expended, I thought it right to include in the Bill a maximum figure beyond which advances cannot be made without further authority from Parliament. That figure is £50 million.

Mr. Ellis Smith: Am I correct in understanding that the Minister said that if a firm had a scheme already in operation that had reached the standard laid down, it would be considered to be exempt from paying the levy, or would be exempt from the training suggested by the board? If that is so, would that also apply to a section of industry that was already organised in accordance with the standard laid down by the board?

Mr. Godber: No, the position is not quite as the hon. Gentleman puts it. I am sorry if I have not made it clear.
The position is that firms in this case will pay the levy, but, if their training is to the standard set down by the board, they will receive grants from the board. The board will have in its funds the money provided from the levy plus some money provided by the Government. It could be that the type of firm that the hon. Gentleman has in mind might get back more in the form of return from the board than in fact it has contributed.
I think that that is the point, and that that is how it will work. There is a degree of flexibility. But, in general, the firms will pay, and then, according to what they are providing, they will be entitled to claim reimbursement from the board, if the board is so satisfied.
Clause 7 specifies the procedure under which training boards will make proposals to the Minister. It also gives the Minister power to dismiss a board and appoint a new one if the board fails to submit proposals after being directed to do so, or submits proposals which the Minister considers unsatisfactory. Such a power is clearly necessary and the fact that it exists is likely to act as a

spur to the board. But, personally, I do not expect to have to use it. Indeed, it is my fervent wish that it will never need to be used.
Clause 11 requires the Minister to appoint a Central Training Council. This is a useful addition to the White Paper proposals. The council will be advisory. It has been argued that this council should be given executive functions and should exercise over the individual training boards the authority which under the Bill is given to the Minister. The T.U.C. urged this view strongly at one stage.
Such a body could have no influence unless funds were placed at its disposal; and I do not see how any Minister could remain responsible to Parliament without himself determining the way in which public funds were to be disbursed. Either responsibility to Parliament would have to go, or the Minister would have to exercise such control over the work of the central authority that the justification for its separate existence would disappear. I do not see any alternative to making the Minister responsible for the way in which public funds are made available to the boards.
Having said that, I wish to make it clear that this does not mean that the Central Training Council cannot perform a valuable co-ordinating function advising the Minister on the administration of the Act. I understand that the T.U.C. now accepts this view.
The presence on the council of a number of chairmen of individual boards will help to keep the council in close touch with the work of the boards and help to knit the whole process together. It will fulfill a valuable function in that way and I am grateful for the suggestion that such a council should be included.
The only remaining Clause to which I need draw attention at this stage is Clause 16. I do so particularly to explain that it has nothing to do with training boards. Section 3(6) of the Employment and Training Act, 1948, provides that a payment of up to £500,000 may be made each year from the National Insurance Fund towards the Minister of Labour's expenses in providing training courses for persons entitled to unemployment benefit. The amount of the payment is related to the


assumed average saving to the fund resulting from the attendance of unemployed men and women at Government training centres. This year a payment of £425,000 has been made.
Increases in unemployment benefit and an expansion of Government training centres may soon make the upper limit too low. We propose, therefore, in the Bill, to raise the limit to £1 million and to provide for it to be further increased if necessary by Statutory Instrument. We have, in fact, taken advantage of the Bill to include this necessary and useful amendment. I am sure that it will commend itself to the House.
The provisions of the Bill do not apply to the Crown. Some people have said that they should and I understand that point of view. The Government employ, in their industrial establishments, a large number of people of the same skills as are to be found in industry. It has been argued that Government Departments, in their capacity as industrial employers, should be placed in the same position as other employers and be obliged to pay the levy and observe the training standards set by the appropriate board. I understand this point of view and I have given a great deal of thought to it, but we must remember that the Government are not in the same position as other employers. Each Minister is responsible to Parliament for his own Department.
It would be an unnecessary complication to place on other Government Departments the obligation of each paying a levy and claiming reimbursement grants if the objectives of the Bill can be achieved more simply in other ways. It is and will remain our firm policy to ensure that Government Departments will, in respect of their own employees, at least equal the standards set by training boards for industrial training and associated further education. Hon. Members always have the opportunity of bringing before Ministers any examples where this has not been done and this would appear to be a more effective way of achieving our aim than of bringing them under the boards. My Department will be ready to advise other Departments on the training it would be appropriate for them to provide, and I can assure hon. Members that my colleagues will see that their Departments make a fair and reasonable

contribution to training in the appropriate industries.
I said in opening my speech that the Bill fits into the present theme of the Government, namely, that of the modernisation of Britain. The Bill provides the framework for modernising our training structure in industry. It is on the boards, which are to be established under the Bill, that the success of this policy will depend.
I have been encouraged by the favourable reception which the proposals in the Bill have met from all sides of industry and I look to its early passage on to the Statute Book and, thereafter, to the establishment of boards for certain key sectors of the economy as soon as possible. The opportunity will arise then for a real raising of standards of training in industry and this, in turn, should help to maintain and strengthen Britain's position as one of the leading industrial nations of the world.

4.45 p.m.

Mr. Ray Gunter: I am sure that it will be the desire of the whole House to welcome the right hon. Gentleman upon his first speech as Minister of Labour. While I am able to wish him a happy stay in his new office, I cannot, of course, wish him a very long one. I join with him in expressing gratitude for the work of his predecessor, to whom this job was very dear indeed, and who did a tremendous amount of work on this subject.
The right hon. Gentleman said at the end of his speech that the Bill fits into the present theme of the Government, modernisation. We were told years ago that we were all Socialists. A few years ago we were all planners. Now the rallying cry from Kinross to Marylebone is that we are all modernisers and are adapting ourselves to the scientific age.
It is, perhaps, not inappropriate that the first Bill with which we are dealing this Session makes a substantial effort to translate the high-flown oratory of modernisation into reality and attempts to get industry geared to the great problems that lie before us today. I am sure that I take the Minister with me in saying that the problems that are with us are very grave indeed; they are not merely technical ones. The sense of


purpose contained in Bills of this sort will bring us to the state of modernisation that we desire.
As I said, the nature of our problems is grave. It is no good imagining that we can set up boards or training councils and thereby overcome these great difficulties. In some places the locusts have already eaten deep holes and I can express this position no better than by repeating some words used by the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor, only five weeks ago when, in a speech at the Hilton Hotel, he said:
We must all realise the extent to which sound economic growth depends upon the efficient use of our most valuable natural assets—manpower. Yet the truth is that far too many employers give little thought to the question of developing the potential of those they employ. Many provide no training at all; many provide training only of a most perfunctory kind; and many forget the important part which further education can—and should—play in the training of young people.
The right hon. Gentleman went on to add these significant words:
We all know only too well that the economy has suffered from shortages of certain kinds of skilled labour ever since the war; and I am sure that only a part of these shortages are revealed in the statistics which my Department collects.
In other words, we have never had the true picture of the situation placed before us, not even as contained in the statistics of the Ministry of Labour.
The right hon. Gentleman continued:
We can only guess how much the country as a whole has suffered because men and women at all levels in industry and commerce are not properly trained. What is certain is that the loss in terms of productive capacity must be considerable. And it is a loss we cannot afford.
I apologise for this rather long quotation, but I doubt whether the situation has been summed up so well as in this speech five weeks ago. The right hon. Gentleman's predecessor added:
…few industries have developed any means of ensuring that they get the number of trained people that they need; there is no way of ensuring that all employers play their part; there has been little control of the quality of training; and there have been few attempts to examine in a critical but constructive way methods and customs of training which have been in operation for several generations.
That is the situation that we face, and when the right hon. Gentleman talks of

modernisation as the general theme today, the Government cannot escape some responsibility for the fact that the nettle was not grasped five years ago.
I would in all fairness admit that there has been no unanimity amongst either employers or trade unions on the extension of statutory training, but that does not excuse the Government, which should have been seized of the position as it was then. Government alone can give leadership when sections of the public or of industry are warring, and the Government must accept some blame, after twelve years of office, for this situation. While no good purpose is served now in holding any lengthy inquests—if we are to get the nation into the right state, it is not inquests we want, but action—it should not be forgotten by hon. Members opposite that they cannot just run away from these problems six months before a General Election. They must bear some responsibility for the present position.
There has been a very big change in attitudes over the five years since the Carr Committee submitted its Report. Although I did not agree with some of the conclusions of that Report, I think it only fitting that this House should pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Mitcham (Mr. R. Carr)—now Secretary for Technical Co-operation—for his attention and diligence in relation to this problem. At that time, there was a complete denial—and I do not say that the employers and the trade unions did not share it—that there was any need for State intervention. There was almost an absolute resistance to State intervention in training. The necessity for it has been proved in 1963. The Minister's predecessor in office painted the picture only five weeks ago. We know—some of us knew years ago—that this conflict of opinion within industry would not be reconciled until a Government themselves set up the machinery and supplied the necessary money. Therefore, the change goes deeper even than it is on training.
There will inevitably be greater intervention by the State in industry. I do not talk here of interference. It is inevitable, in the technical revolution that is about us and with the monolithic


structures in industry that are being created, that we and the party opposite will have to accept State intervention if the national needs are to be met. This Bill is the background and it is in considering further measures that might deal with severance pay and redundancy that I again say to the Minister that he will have to do the job for them, because he will never get complete unanimity there.
That is where the leadership of Government should come in, and where the functions of the Ministry of Labour should be seen at their best. That is why some of us long for the day—and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will participate in the process—when we shall see the Ministry of Labour restored to a great place as a Ministry of State, speaking with authority.
Our task now is to find the balance, to decide how far the Government can intervene to provide the machinery for the reconciliation of the difficulties of industry. I have said before, and some people have not liked it, that I have never believed that the man in Whitehall knows what is best for industry—I do not, I never have, and I never shall—because he is never aware of the atmospheres and forces, and so on, that flow in industry. But, as I say, there is bound to be increasing intervention and guidance to ensure that those who are inevitably, and sometimes justifiably, in conflict in industry can find leadership and have their points of difficulty arbitrated on. I hope that the Minister, in the short stay he will have in his office, will bring that authority to bear.
The Bill purports to create machinery. As the Minister has said, it is a machinery Bill. How it works will depend on the personnel who man the machinery. The Bill gives the broad outlines for industry to get down to this major task. But, because it is a machinery Bill, because we are only setting the broad pattern of how we may bring together the separate parts of industry, coupled with our educationists, there are a host of questions that are not answered in the Bill, and I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman.will know in his heart that most of the speeches this evening will be of an interrogatory character. Hon. Members will be probing, and trying to find out what is in the mind of the Minister about certain aspects of the Bill that are vague.
I do not complain of the Bill's vagueness or of its flexibility—I cannot do that—but it is the duty of the Opposition to try to get out of the Minister as much information as is possible in order to discover how his mind is working. I am not at all critical of the Bill's seeming vagueness, because we are exploring a new area. I do not know how many centuries it took to build political democracy in this country, but when people talk of industrial democracy and of a happy state of reconciliation between unions and managements, we realise that that is a fairly slow process, too.
This is an area in which we shall have to feel our way, and adjust ourselves. I was glad to note that the Minister was not adamant on this, or dogmatic. It could well be that in a year or two we shall want to look at certain aspects of this Measure again in the light of experience.
Let me, therefore, start asking the questions. We have no doubt that the Ministers'intentions are very honourable, but we are very curious to know how he will actually handle the body. I thought that the right hon. Gentleman skipped over the Central Training Council rather delicately, and rather suggested that the Trades Union Congress had now seized on it—almost with enthusiasm. Of course, it has not, and the Minister knows that. The T.U.C. has simply accepted the fact, as a body of good and loyal citizens, that the Minister will have his way, and good luck to him.
There is a lot of strange history about this Central Training Council. Almost up to the end of last year—after November, I think—there was opposition to the inclusion of any central authority at all. Then the Minister comes along, as I understand the situation—and I hear these things only secondhand—and suggests, "Well, we will start to define certain limited responsibilities." That was found very unsatisfactory, and I now understand that the situation is eased to the extent that the Minister has declared a large area in which responsibilities will fall on the C.T.C.
The House should know what those responsibilities are. It should know the area in which this council is to operate. It has been argued that the


council should be given its own secretariat, and should exercise general supervision and guidance over the area boards. Frankly, I hesitate to be dogmatic about this. I cannot really tell the House where exactly my mind is on the subject; whether this council should have executive authority, or whether, as the Minister has explained, in view of the large sums of public money involved it is better that the council should be advisory.
I warn the Minister that some of us are a little weary of advisory committees that do nothing. I should like to hear further argument from the Minister why this central body could not have been mandated to carry out research and publicity and allowed to co-ordinate the work of the separate boards. In the few moments which the right hon. Gentleman spent on it today I did not hear sufficient arguments to make up our minds. It would be disastrous if the Central Training Council became just another advisory body. We have so many advisory bodies that have been futile because of their failure to attract men of substance. These men have felt that the work was largely unimportant.
We shall command the right men at this level of the operation only as long as it is seen that they have a tremendously important job to do and that their responsibilities are clearly defined. I understand that the Minister's first thoughts on this body were that it would not have made worth while the services of the right type of men. I repeat that the work of this Central Training Council and indeed of all the boards will depend upon the knowledge and ability and almost a sense of dedication which men can bring to all the boards.
The Minister has mentioned channels of communication in industry. Some of us have found in the field of joint consultation that we have written some of the finest rule books and constitutions on how men should consult and these have failed because there has not been the will and the spirit to make them work. Unless we can get the right people, with their responsibilities defined, to handle the machine which the Minister proposes to create we shall get nowhere.
There is one important point which is related to the Central Training Council. It is rather strange that the Minister did not mention in his speech, nor can there be found in the Bill, suggestions about relating the end product of training to our overall manpower budget. There is no provision in the Bill for relating the nation's total manpower needs as defined by the boards to the needs defined by the long-term overall economic planning of the N.E.D.C. It would be absurd if the boards and the council were isolated from this essential piece of forward planning. We know from American experience that the automation of industry rapidly brings problems of structural unemployment which must be forecast so that retraining schemes can be made available.
I think that I understand what the Minister means when he believes that, somehow, there must be a direct link between the training boards and the body which is responsible for forward manpower planning. I imagine that the Minister has something in his mind on this point. Perhaps later in the debate, or in Committee, he can explain to us how it will work and how the overall national manpower planning will be seen in individual industrial context.
We are entitled to ask how many trainees in each age group the Minister intends to cater for. The Bill does not suggest how much adult training is necessary, nordoes it apportion or emphasise the relation between training centres and a number of schemes in private industry. These are questions which I fully understand will be answered only as the implementation of the Bill unfolds. Nevertheless, it is the duty of the Minister to be as open as he can, particularly in Committee, on how his mind works on these subjects. It should be remembered that the N.E.D.C, in its assessment of Swedish and American schemes in the document "Conditions favourable to Faster Growth", said that Britain will have to retrain each year over 100,000 adults alone.
This is the nature of the problem, and this is why I hope that the Minister will leave the mechanics and, in Committee, open his mind more and more to these fundamental parts of the problem. When we add to this the numerical problem


and the enormous cost of revitalising training schemes for young workers, it will be seen that the eventual cost of a proper national programme will be exceedingly high. The Minister should, therefore, tell us how much of the £50 million available to him he intends to use for the essential pump-priming.
The Bill is imprecise on financial matters, for reasons which I fully understand, While up to £50 million may be granted or loaned by the Minister to the boards, the Financial Memorandum states that for the financial year 1964–65, during which the first boards to be established will begin to function, the cost is unlikely to exceed £500,000. There is, perhaps significantly,no breakdown of what proportion of the training expenditure the Government intend should come from the levy or what proportion of their own contribution the Government intend to recover. In any case, there is a built-in guarantee that little finance will be available before a General Election.
As the debate unfolds, the Minister no doubt will hear from his supporters about the criticisms made by the craft unions and about the restrictions placed upon the number of apprentices. I beg the Minister to remember that the objection of the craft unions is on the question of safeguarding employment and that it is not their intention to restrict training. In the North-East and in Scotland it seems something of a mockery to workmen that there should be a dramatic campaign to secure more skilled craftsmen for the training of these young men when the men who are already skilled at their jobs are out of work.
The boards will have to move with care and the Government will have to find more generous incentives for the mobility of labour than they have succeeded in finding so far. A great deal of success in this field, and of success in assuaging the fears and suspicions of craftsmen, depends entirely on what measure of confidence that this or any other Government can get over to the workmen in the belief that the Government are sincerely determined to work for policies of full employment and of growth in the economy. We must have this element of confidence if we are to diminish the present fears and suspicions of our people.
A point which was mentioned almost only in passing by the Minister, but one on which I have pondered in the last few days, is the need for regional or local machinery and for joint arrangements between boards. The T.U.C. has quoted a relevant case to the Minister. What does the right hon. Gentleman think about a situation where plumbers are engaged in the engineering, shipbuilding, chemical and gas industries? What will happen about a training school for plumbers on Tees-side? This point of detail and of planning and coordination might well be gone into in Committee.
I was interested in the Minister's reflections on the training of management. It is no secret that employers did not want the training of management, and I can understand why. I am very glad indeed that the Minister has rejected their blandishments, but his words created a little doubt in my mind. It was as if it was a matter of secondary importance and as if the training of management should be dealt with by the boards at some later date. Management is in need of training today just as much as the workmen are.
Most of our problems in this respect arise because management has not handled the situation which it could see was arising. I am not going to talk about the higher executives and that level of management. As I have said before from this Box, one of our biggest problems in industry has been the lack of trained personnel in the lower levels of management. It is here that the crunch is always felt in industry. It is by the training of these men who come from the workship floor that we can provide a stratum that can pour a lot of oil on the wheels of industry.
The man in the workshop does not often think of the boss as the managing director. He has probably never heard of him. It is the level of management who issue the instructions with whom he is concerned. I beg of the Minister to dismiss any thoughts of pushing away this problem. I should have thought that the boards would attach as much importance to the training of management as they would to the training of our skilled mechanics. There is an urgent need for the boards and others.
including the Minister, to give a measure of priority to the training of the lower and middle levels of management.
I know that many of my hon. Friends wish to speak in this debate and, like the Minister, I shall leave matters of education to be discussed by others. I am always a little frightened of entering the field of education, for I find that in such matters nobody agrees with anybody. At least, in trade union matters we agree sometimes.

The Minister of Education (Sir Edward Boyle): I think that the hon. Member will find one consolation at least. People agree on one thing as a rule in educational matters, and that is in disagreeing with the Minister.

Mr. Gunter: They have my blessing.
I should now like to say a word or two about women in industry. We shall be faced with an extraordinary situation, perhaps in ten years. We could be faced with a shortage of women in industry. We need not go into the reasons, but I believe that the turnover of women in industry is inevitably greater than that of men, and there is a great purpose to be served by including as many girls as we possibly can in the training of skills in industry. In my gloomy moments I have ruminated on the desirability of women in public life, but the necessity for them in industry is becoming increasingly obvious each day.
We on this side of the House welcome the Bill, and we shall do all we can to expedite its passage on to the Statute Book. Whatever I have said in criticism of the Bill can be followed up and probed in Committee. I believe that there will be searching questions. I am sure that the whole House will be glad that, however belated this Measure may be, this great step forward has been taken and the nation itself now becomes involved in the training of our skilled personnel.
I wish the Minister well. I hope that the educationists, the unions and the employers will try to strip themselves of much of their traditional vested interests and inhibitions, and that they will regard this task, in which there is a great sense of urgency, as a great step towards making our industry dynamic

again, towards making this nation powerful in its material life so that the standards of life of our people may be improved as a result of supplying the basic needs of industry, namely, the skills and techniques of our people, which are the highest in the world.

5.15 p.m.

Mr. Kenneth Lewis: In the short time that I have been in this House, I have been constantly surprised at the fact that, while outside the House from time to time—fortunately, not too often—industrial relations have become the subject of battles between one side and the other, when we come to debate these subjects across the Floor of the House there is a great deal of unanimity between us, not only on legislation but on what should be done to get a better spirit in industry.
I therefore welcome this Bill. In doing so, may I join with other hon. Members in welcoming my right hon. Friend in his new post and pay tribute to the work of his predecessor, now Lord Blakenham, who did a great deal while he was at the Ministry to make it a live Ministry. The Ministry made an impact upon industry through the Contracts of Employment Act, and I hope it will do so again by means of this Measure.
There has been a good deal of delay in dealing with this subject of industrial training. This was mentioned by the hon. Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter), who spoke of the years that the locusts had eaten. He gave the impression that there had been a delay on the part of the Government. He admitted that there had been some delay caused by hesitation on the part of the trade unions—I believe that to some extent there has also been delay on the part of the employers themselves—in accepting the implications of the Government's intervention in training matters.
The Government having finally decided that something ought to be done, it is not surprising that this Bill is acceptable to both sides of the House. Whenever the Government take a firm line on something, those people who have opposed it, whether at management or trade union level, are inclined to say, "Very well, we will agree", despite the fact that for a long time they have been holding out against it.
There is one question that I would put to the hon. Member for Southwark. I wonder whether the trade unions and the Labour Party would have supported this Measure, say two years ago, quite so freely as they support it today. I do not wish to be too controversial, but I wonder whether they sense that there is to be a General Election in the not very distant future.

Mr. Gunter: I can assure the hon. Gentleman that I myself for certain, and many of my colleagues, would have supported this Measure five years ago.

Mr. Lewis: It is pleasant to know that we both agree that this Bill has much to commend it.

Mr. James Boyden: Mr. James Boyden (Bishop Auckland) rose—

Mr. Lewis: I do not wish to give way again; I have just done so.
In recent debates, there have been references to the Robbins and Newsom Reports, and I believe this Bill follows on effectively from those Reports. If, arising out of Robbins, we get all the scientists and administrators we need in industry as the hub of thewheel, and if the Newsom Report gives us, through an improvement in secondary education, the supervisors and higher technicians as the spokes of the wheel, we shall still depend on good training of the worker, the artisan in industry, to provide us with the rim of the wheel. If we do not have that training and skill, at worst the wheel will grind to a halt and at best it will wobble along. I think it is generally agreed that we can no longer afford to wobble along.
It is a very long time since the Carr Report and since the right hon. Member for Mitcham (Mr. R. Carr) indicated to the House that he himself felt that there was a need for Government intervention on training in industry. I am sure that this must be for him, at any rate, a Bill about which he feels completely happy and with which he is glad to have been associated in advance.
Because of the delay that has taken place during the last year or two, there is all the more reason why the Government should now proceed with as much speed as possible, and I hope both that we shall get the Bill quickly through its Com-

mittee and other stages on the Floor of the House and that after than the Minister will set up the boards as soon as possible. There is a speeding up of technical education throughout the country. Therefore, it is necessary that there must be a speeding up of training in industry which must be linked with that speeding up of technical education.
I find that the most gratifying feature of the Bill is the new and quite unique link—legislative wise—that is going to take place for the first time between industry and education. It may be that the Bill is in some respects permissive and that after it becomes an Act many things will have to be done to get results arising from it. But one thing is certain, and that is that the Bill is going to force industry and education to work together as never before.
There are, I suppose, three reasons why people get educated, and I give no order of priority. The first is because they have to acquire a skill and have to learn to do a job. Secondly, they have to learn how to behave towards one another. It is not only a question of good manners but of how to treat one another, because it is important that we learn how to deal with each other as citizens and also play a part as individuals towards the Government's activities in the world at large. Thirdly, people have to be more and more educated for the right use of their leisure. We cannot keep education in a watertight compartment. It cannot be something which is monastic, which deals with things not related to day-today life and which has nothing to do with industry or how we live.
Indeed, one of the reasons why—I suppose I could always be told that I am prejudiced on this, but my views are quite well known about it—I think the public schools should have young people brought into them from the State stream is not because I believe it would help anyone in the State stream. They are well able to look after themselves today and can go to the top in industry or commerce and the professions and can get into any of the universities.
I believe that the great advantage of opening the public schools to people from outside would simply be that doing so would take those schools out of a monastic state in which they may not be in touch with the general stream of


life. That is why I cannot agree with the party opposite which wants to destroy these schools altogether. I would prefer to follow the Fleming Report on this matter. I may be asked what this has got to do with the subject we are debating. [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] It has a great deal to do with it, because, for the very first time, we are dealing with a Bill that is linking education with industry, that is bringing closer together the education of the nation and its working life on which we depend, because we have to make things to sell abroad.
I should like to ask the Minister if, when he winds up, he could, perhaps, give us a line on the part the Youth Employment Service will play in this matter. The Youth Employment Service is probably the one part of the Ministry of Labour which has had both connections with industry and links with the schools. It seems to me that this service ought to be represented on these training boards both at the top and the area or industrial level.
The levy was mentioned in the White Paper, and I think that the Government have been generous in providing something like £50 million, part of which is going to be retrieved by the levy. I would hope that industry itself would be prepared to provide and be enthusiastic about providing the money for the purposes of training under the Bill. I hope most of the money will be given by industry and not by the Government. I do not want to see the Government providing more than 50 per cent, of the cash, because I want industry to remain independent in providing its own training programmes.
The Bill, of course, as was suggested by the hon. Member for Southwark, is certainly not going to solve all the problems of training in industry. We have the 11-plus as the barrier for many children in the educational field, but we have also a barrier in industry—the 16-plus barrier, a situation which I think we really ought no longer to accept. It is quite wrong that a young man cannot enter upon an apprenticeship if he has got beyond the age of 16. This restriction at a time when the raising of the school-leaving age is called for—and hon. Members opposite are very anxious about and are constantly

pressing for the raising of the school leaving age—is not really acceptable.

Mr. Austen Albu: The hon. Gentleman is really out of date. It is simply not true. There are a number of agreements made by unions, including one by the Confederation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Unions, with the employers in which apprenticeships are permitted to be entered into after the age of 16 and even later.

Mr. Lewis: That may be so, but it is still not generally the accepted practice, and the unions which accept apprentices after the age of 16 are the exceptions.
Then, of course, there is the question of the number of apprentices which the unions permit to each tradesman. I think that the average in the country is something like one in four. This number could be increased in many industries. It certainly should be increased in firms which are prosperous and busy at a time when there may be high unemployment in an area. This is something which has been talked about over the years, and yet the trade unions have done nothing about it.
Then there is the old vexed question of the period of apprenticeship. The Minister touched upon this thorny problem and then said that the Bill was not intended to deal with it.

Mr. Charles Loughlin: Before the hon. Gentleman replies to the question of the ratio of apprentices to craftsmen, may I point out that, while I appreciate the point he is making, I am sure he will understand that one of the big problems is that if the ratio is raised it produces an increasing problem in the event of any recession in a particular industry? In the light of automation, which is inevitable, this increases the problem. Will the hon. Gentleman devote a minute or two to that aspect of the matter?

Mr. Lewis: I do not think that it will create a problem. I think that, training being accepted, it must follow that if there are too many trained at a given period, then 20 or even 10 years after it may be necessary to do a certain amount of retraining. It is better that boys should get the opportunity to be trained in something. What the hon. Gentleman


is suggesting is that they should not be trained at all.
The period of apprenticeship of five years, recently reduced in the construction industries to four years, is patently ridiculous. With all the modern techniques we have it must be obvious that we can easily train in a period much less than five years. That is a period longer than it takes to get a university degree; it is a period longer than the average barrister takes to be trained; and it is a period a good deal longer than most people have to spend training in the commercial world. Most people accept this, and yet the unions have been unable to concede until quite recently that there was any case for reducing the period down from five years.
There is, I think, one other aspect which ought to be considered on this, and it is that young people are marrying a good deal younger today than ever they did before, and it causes the utmost problem to them if at the age of 21 they have not yet completed their apprenticeship and cannot get jobs as fully fledged journeymen. This is something which is bound to arise out of this Bill, and we really cannot any longer shelve it. We have to do something about it I hope that managements and unions themselves will deal with it, but we have been waiting for a very long time, and really, if they refuse to act. the Minister will obviously have to take action.
At the Hailwood Estate on Mersey-side recently there were recently trained 6,500 men to make motor cars, and they are turning out something like 700 motor cars a week. Those men were trained by the Ford Motor Company in a period of one year. I know that hon. Gentlemen opposite are going to say that this is a semi-skilled job. This is true, but I wonder whether we are not in the state now where, having given the basic training in apprenticeship, which should be done much more quickly, we ought to go on to retrain people for a very short period of three or four months' training, say, every ten years. At any rate, this is the situation which is going to arise. As techniques change, retraining is going to be even more important than a long period of initial training, once the men have got the basis.
So it seems to me that although this Bill is a great step forward, before it is going to be completely effective many of these barriers have got to be removed. The Leader of the Opposition yesterday made great play with the fact that certain young people were unable to get into the universities. He might have a word with some of his friends about some of the young people who cannot get training today because of the old-fashioned attitudes of some of our trade unions which have persisted and which they have refused to alter.
Of course, there will have to be priorities in dealing with the introduction of the administrative machinery of a Bill of this sort. Clearly, we cannot operate it right across the board straight away. I should like my right hon. Friend, when he winds up, to give, if he can, some indication whether the priority will be accepted of setting up of industrial training boards or area training boards in those areas where unemployment is highest at the present time. I think it is important that in those areas, in particular, we should either give the young men who cannot get jobs other than semi-skilled jobs, or who have to go away from home to start their training, a chance to go into a Government training centre, and carry on for a year or two, or else subsidise firms in the area to set up special training schools in order to take these boys in. As I have previously indicated, it is really disastrous for a young man if he finds, during a period when there is perhaps just a temporary depression, that because of that temporary depression he is unable to get training, whereas a year later there would be every opportunity for him to get the work he wants.

Mr. Cyril Bence: This is what is already happening in Scotland in many existing apprenticeship schemes. Firms short of work and short of orders are putting apprentices, of all people, on short time. I have raised this with the Minister of Labour.

Mr. Lewis: Yes. and I think this Bill will enable the Minister to take action to see that short-time working which has been imposed by a firm is met by the Minister in some way or another, either by payment out of the levy, which is how I would have thought it would


work, to keep the man employed, or else in some other way, by allowing him to work on his training for the rest of the week ata Government training centre.
There are two other points I wish to raise arising out of the Bill, and the first is on tests. I really do hope that on this question of industrial training we do not intend to get ourselves into the position where we start setting examinations and having a sort of final examination. It would clearly be absurd if at the end of four or five years'training a young man were to be told he was not competent because he had not passed the examination. If we are going to have tests they have got to be tests which will go through for the full period of the training. I notice that the Parliamentary Secretary is looking askance at this. But this is just the kind of thing that can happen when we put into a Bill, without specifying what it means, that there are to be tests, and when we get certain educational people involved. As I have already said, I am glad that they are involved, but if we get them setting tests in the way in which they usually set tests, we can lead ourselves into considerable trouble. I hope, therefore, that this question of tests will be dealt with very carefully indeed.
Finally I come to the question of the tribunal and the independence of the chairman of the board when it comes to discussing the amount of the levy. Ican understand the reason why the Minister has said that the chairman of the training board should not be involved in deciding how much this levy is to be, but if the parties concerned will not accept the Minister's ruling and it goes to the tribunal, then presumably the chairman of the tribunal himself will have a casting vote in that tribunal if the tribunal cannot agree. All I want to ask the Minister is, where does the buck stop? Because it does not seem to stop with him; it does not seem to stop with the chairman of the training board; he is not involved at all. I should have thought it pushing the thing a little far to stop at the tribunal. I should have thought that the chairman of the board should either be allowed to exercise a discretion or else that the Minister himself should do it.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour (Mr. William Whitelaw): I think my hon. Friend has got the position of the tribunal slightly wrong. The tribunal is for the right of the individual employer, who may object to the size of the levy imposed on him, to appeal to the tribunal, but it is not to be operated as a long stop, so to speak, behind the decision as to how much the levy should be.

Mr. Lewis: I would have thought that it is in fact a long stop. We will not argue about this. The question of whether he pays the levy or not is implicit in the Bill, but the question of how much it is is a matter, presumably, between the employer and the Minister.
We have waited a long time for the Bill, and we are glad that we now have it. I have no doubt that there will be Amendments in Committee, but, whatever the Amendments may be, the Bill will be effective only if both sides of industry decide to make it effective. It has the merit that, for the first time, there is a bridge between education and industry at both employer and trade union levels. I hope that the many things which require to be done to make the Bill effective will, in fact, be done by industry and that we shall see industrial training in this country providing the skills we need to keep us in the forefront industrially among the nations.

5.40 p.m.

Mr. Austen Albu: I believe that the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford (Mr. K. Lewis) has some experience of these matters, but I cannot help thinking that he is rather out of date. None of us on these benches, particularly those who are trade unionists, would deny that the unions and their members have, perhaps, been as conservative about some of these matters as have the employers, but to suggest that the blame is entirely with the unions and that the employers in industry are not equally to blame is to deny the facts.
For every accusation against unions that they have been restrictive in allowing the entry of apprentices—which, in most cases, I believe to be completely untrue—or have been slow to recognise the need for shortening the period of apprenticeship or extending the age of


entry one can make the accusation against those employers—the vast majority, I fear—to whom apprentices have been nothing but cheap labour and who have provided nothing in the way of adequate training or instruction.
These things are well known. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to be taken seriously on these questions, he must put the blame fairly where it lies, on both sides of industry, and, as I shall show in a moment, to an equal extent on the Government.
The hon. Gentleman was a little unfair, also, to the Minister of Education in saying that there has been no connection up to now between industry and education. After all, the vast part of the educational side of industrial training has been carried out in the technical colleges, which have always been under the Minister of Education. In fact, going back to the history of the matter, there was no educational system in this country for the ordinary common man and woman until it was partly set up by bodies like the mechanics'institutes in the old days and, later, the technical institutes and so forth. The relationship between educationfor the mass of the people and industry is pretty long-lived. Indeed, one can say that one of the problems of this country was that the small number of people who, in the last century, got any education at all were an elite who had no education for industry or for any practical or useful art. It was left to other bodies to commence this, until it was eventually taken over by the Ministry of Education.

Mr. K. Lewis: I was not suggesting that the links between education and industry were new. I was making the point that in the Bill there is a specific link created through the boards being set up, with direct membership and representation of the educational bodies on the boards. One would be here a long time if one were to talk about all the links between industry and education. Some industrial organisations in this country have their own education officers and have links with the universities. I know all that.

Mr. Albu: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman does. But I think that he did imply that this was the first link between industry and education:

whereas, of course, most of us who have been in industry have had a good deal to do with educational institutions for a very long time.
The last time I spoke in a debate on apprenticeship and training was when Iopened a debate on behalf of the Opposition in June, 1960. The Minister of Labour said that we were slow to press for Government action, that we were as reluctant to have the Government take the necessary steps as they were themselves. I can only say that, if he will refer to the speeches on that occasion, he will see that we were pressing very hard indeed for Government action of the kind which they are now taking, but we got extremely conservative replies from the present Secretary of State for Industry and Trade and the present Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) in supporting the Bill and in saying that, of course, its success will depend very much on how it is operated. This, in turn, will depend on the knowledge and the drive of the Minister or Ministers and their Departments who will be responsible for it. This brings me at once to my doubts about the Central Training Council.
I accept that the council could not be an executive body. The Minister put the case against that, and I think that I accept it, but there is the danger that, even as an advisory body, it will be just as ineffective as the present Industrial Training Council, to which the Government have given a certainamount of money. Bodies of this kind, large, representative advisory bodies, called together infrequently, are quite useless unless they are supported by strong permanent staffs with sufficient experts.
I believe that such a body should, first, have a full-time chairman. Second, the staff, who would, of course, be members of the staff of the Ministry of Labour, should include a number of real experts in industrial training, not just one adviser in a single branch of industry as, I believe, the Ministry has at present. Moreover, it will need a strong statistical section.
I say this for the reasons which my hon. Friend gave. We do not know


much about the future needs of differing industries and different occupations. Such a section would have to co-operate very closely with the N.E.D.C. or whatever other planning machinery there might be in the Government in forecasting the pattern of requirements for different occupations in different industries, both nationally and regionally.
Incidentally, it might set about the task of trying to find out what is the true figure for apprenticeships and learnerships at present. It was stated in the Carr Report and in the debates which followed the Carr Report, and never denied, that the figures for apprenticeships we aregiven from time to time by the Ministry of Labour are, to put it mildly, inaccurate. I gave the basis for that statement in a speech at that time, and I do not want to go into it now. I am sure that the Parliamentary Secretary knows about it. It would be valuable to have the true figures for apprenticeships and learnerships in different industries, which I do not believe we have now.
Third, it will be necessary to build up an inspectorate in the Ministry, subject, no doubt, to the advice of the advisory council, to ensure that standards among different boards are comparable. Of course, they cannot be the same because the industries will be different, but it is essential to ensure that both among industries and among regions we have comparable and adequate standards for those organisations, whether they are firms or other bodies, which will receive the grants for training. They must be standards suitable, of course, to the occupations concerned.
As my right hon. Friend said, one of the tasks of any central body—presumably, the Ministry advised by the Central Training Council—would be to co-ordinate the functions of the various industrial training boards, particularly, for instance, to deal with the problem of occupations which overlap industries, the problem of the engineering craftsman who may be in many industries, of the clerk, the book-keeper or, as my hon. Friend said, of the plumber.
This is connected with the question of the levy and the grants to which the Minister referred. I should have preferred to see—I realise that there would be compli-

cations—the levy settled on the basis of the numbers employed in each occupation by a firm and payable to the appropriate board. I can see that there are difficulties here and it might need some sort of central collection and distribution of the funds; but it might be worth thinking about.
Similarly, of course, a grant for training could be given to any firm doing training in a particular occupation. My hon. Friend the Member for Southward mentioned I.C.I, which carries out training in engineering. Even if I.CI.'s main contribution will be to a chemical industry training board, I see no reason why it should not also make a contribution to an engineering training board and get a grant from it for the engineering training it carries out.
Little has been said about commercial and clerical occupations, but I think that almost more needs to be done about these than about other occupations. They are in a very difficult position. Except for special types of clerical and commercial work—I hope that my hon. Friend will not mind if I suggest that one of these is railway work—we may very well need a central training board. This might well be preferable to including these occupations in the industrial boards, particularly, perhaps, because the greater proportion of training for them will have to take place in educational institutions rather than within the firms or the organisations themselves.
It is important that the levy should be high enough to be a real encouragement to firms to undertake training. Much of the apprenticeship type of training will have to take place in future in small and medium sized firms because, on the whole, the larger ones are doing their share—although there are exceptions. If these small and medium sized firms are to play their part adequately, they will only be able to do so through group schemes. Very well known is the Engineering Industries Group Apprenticeship Organisation and this, I understand, charges £42 per apprentice in the schemes it administers.
It is very important that the levy should not be so low as to make it cheaper to pay it than to participate in schemes of this sort. This factor must be carefully considered. The levy must be a real encouragement to firms to participate in


schemes. It must not be cheaper to pay the levy and do nothing.
It has been said that the boards will be responsible for training at all levels and I agree, although I am not sure that I entirely agree with my hon. Friend about management training. There is one serious problem, however, arising from the training of professional engineers to which I should like to draw attention. I believe that in ten years' time, when the recommendations of the Robbins Committee are in operation, very few people will be considered professional engineers who have not a degree. Many colleges in which diploma courses are now given will by then be granting degrees.
Many professional institutions now require two years' practical training before considering a man as a professional engineer. I agree with this because I think that this is essential, especially in, for instance, mechanical or production engineering, that graduates who are going to be in charge of workshops or of designing should learn how their ideas are translated into hardware and should have had experience of what it is like to be on the shop floor. I know that among some graduates this is very unpopular but that is often because these schemes of practical training are not very well thought out.
Luckily, in this country we have an almost unique system of sandwich courses which have, so far, been very largely given for diplomas of technology by the colleges of advanced technology or regional colleges. Now the C.A.T.s are to become universities and award degrees. This is a system we should encourage. But the colleges are now up against the very serious difficulty of finding firms willing to sponsor students for these courses or, if the students are college-based, firms willing to take them during their industrial period. The result is that staffs of these colleges are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find such firms.
This is becoming a matter of great urgency, and I draw the attention of the Minister of Education to it because, at the moment, it is his responsibility, although it may well be one that he will share with the industrial training boards. This does not only apply to engineers and technologists but also to technicians,

more and more of whom, I am sure, will receive full-time or sandwich training in future.
I think that we may have to give up the idea of works-based students and give full grants to them to attend courses like other university students. Perhaps the Government could then recoup themselves out of the levies and could give financial encouragement to those firms which undertake industrial training for these students. This illustrates the importance of the closest liaison between the Ministries of Labour and Education—an importance that will grow as the educational pattern changes, as school-life becomes longer, and more and more boys and girls receive higher and further education.
Many jobs will still remain in the economy requiring only a matter of weeks to learn. They will not be of the conveyor-belt—Charlie Chaplin—"Modern Times" kind of job, but will require a high degree of general knowledge, skill and adaptability.
We must face the fact that these jobs will change during a person's working life, that every child is entitled to a preparation for a working life in which there will be such changes, and that we must, therefore, give our young people an education that enables them to become adaptable. Some parts of the Newsom Report are very relevant here where they deal with the relationship between school and vocational education.
But these are not matters of responsibility for industry. They should.be the responsibility of the Minister of Education. I recall that in the debate in June, 1960, I said I would like to see the whole of this responsibility for training transferred to the Minister of Education. I hope that, as we progress in this matter, we shall find it more and more necessary that he should play the greater part so that eventually he may play the whole part. I do not like—it is becoming out of date, anyway—the distinction between school, technical college, university and industrial training, between apprenticeship and studentship.
It is not only the manual workers whose skills will need refurbishing during their working life. Managers, technologists and technicians will need


it too. Recently, I was in Paris, attending a conference called by O.E.C.D. on the problems of retraining of professional engineers during their working life. It was said there that unless these professional engineers had retraining courses to acquaint themselves with new knowledge several times during their working life they might well be too old at 40 to carry out their jobs. How is this to be organised and whose responsibility is it to see that it is done? Who is to finance these courses? These are matters that the new boards, perhaps in co-operation with the professional institutions in this case, will have to consider.
Sometimes when we discuss industrial training we seem to think entirely in terms of quantity. That is not surprising when we consider the number of boys and girls unable to obtain any type of apprenticeship or training whatever. We have been pressing the Government over the last few years to deal with this very serious social as well as economic problem, but it is not only quantity with which we are concerned and certainly the object of the industrial training boards is not one just of quantity, but one of quality.
We all know that some of the large firms—and my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Ellis Smith) is always drawing attention to one of them—have absolutely first-class industrial training schemes. The nationalised industries are outstanding in this respect—at least, most of them—and some industries have good schemes; the building industry is one and the Joint Iron Council is another. Unfortunately, they have had no power so far to compel, or to provide incentives to, firms within their industries to participate. However good the schemes, only a minority of firms do anything about them. We now have a chance to establish for the first time really first-class standards in every industry and in every occupation and it will be for the Ministers jointly to ensure that the industrial training boards set the very highest standards.
In the past, we must agree—and here I would not disagree with the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford—that both sides of industry and the Government

have been complacent. Luckily, over the last few years there has been a growing informed opinion, both inside and outside the House. We have had the excellent research work and finally propaganda of Professor Lady Williams and the work of bodies like the British Association of Commercial and Industrial Education gradually forcing upon the country and industry a recognition of the true situation.
But, of course, there are social changes taking place among the workers themselves which will assist in these changes, and that is why I want to come to what the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford had to say about the unions. I remember attending a meeting of the national committee of my own union, the A.E.U., a couple of years ago, when it was discussing a report from the youth committee. We were always getting resolutions from the youth committee pressing for better industrial training. I was particularly interested in speeches of members of the national committee who were recognising that their own children were staying longer at school, to 16, 17, or 18, and asking in what way the union would face up to the problem this posed for industrial training.
It is for this reason that my own union and the Confederation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Unions have accepted this position, and an agreement, as I said when I interrupted the hon. Member, is now, if not signed, in process of being signed to allow apprentices to start at 17 or even later, with apprenticeships in certain cases reduced to four years, the last year of school counting towards the period of apprenticeship.
I am sure that my own is not the only union where this is taking place. There are also often special agreements in different districts which do not correspond to the general pattern. The hon. Member is completely out of touch and out of date if he does not realise the changes which are being pressed on the unions by their members themselves because of changes in social conditions, changes which the unions are willing to accept.
As has been pointed out, unions are not very willing to accept older men into late apprenticeships in areas where the employment situation does not warrant it. Where it does, there has been


no difficulty about the unions accepting a late entry into apprenticeships, or into a trade. Unfortunately, particularly in the older enginering areas, there is substantial unemployment among skilled engineering craftsmen, and men cannot be expected to welcome increasing numbers into skilled trades if men in those trades already are unemployed.
This applies particularly to the North-East and Scotland and emphasises the need for a regional approach to this problem. There must be a break-up of the whole administration by regions and there must be figures so that we know what the needs of particular regions are for both skilled workers and for training.
What we are discussing is not just an economic problem, but part of the whole process of the development of the system by which our children grow up to be citizens in a modern scientific industrial society. We must not forget that we are dealing with only a part of this problem. No training for modern industry will be of any use unless it is based on a first-class education. It is responsible men and women who are the objects of all our policies of education and training, and we must never forget it.

6.5 p.m.

Mr. Philip Holland: The House is aware of the long experience of the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) in matters relating—

Mr. John Robertson: On a point of order. During the discussion of the Bill, it has been pointed out that education has a large part to play, but I do not see the representative of the Scottish Office who is responsible for education on the Government Front Bench.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir William Anstruther-Gray): That is not a point of order.

Mr. Holland: I was saying that the House is well aware of the long experience of the hon. Member for Edmonton in commercial and industrial training, so I shall not presume to try to follow him through all the intricacies of organisation and co-ordination in which he is clearly so well versed. I prefer to confine myself to one or two comments which occur to me from my own experience.
In company with other hon. Members, I should like most warmly to welcome a Measure which has considerable merit and which will meet a pressing need not only in the country as a whole, but particularly in that area which it is my privilege to serve as an hon. Member. Although, in Acton, there are only 400 streets, there are nearly twice that number of factories and workshops. It is an area of great industrial diversity and has a very high level of economic activity which brings a constant and ever-growing demand for skilled men and women.
This is so much so that the tragic shut-down a few months ago of an engineering company employing about 2,500 employees has had virtually no measurable affect on the higher than national average of full employment that we habitually sustain in Acton. There have been individual tragedies, of course, but those are outside the scope of this debate. What is relevant is that this shut-down has considerably diminished the facilities for apprenticeship training in that area, because the company, Napier Aero Engines Limited, had vigorous and thorough training facilities for more than 200 engineering apprentices. Those facilities have now been abruptly extinguished.
What have we left? Out of a total of more than 700 industrial companies, we have nearly 100 apprenticeship schemes, plus a further 25 non-apprenticeship schemes for office workers and employees in the food manufacturing and catering industries to which my right hon. Friend referred. Of the 40 companies involved in training engineering apprentices in Acton, only 12 are able to run large apprenticeship schemes anywhere near comparable to that one we have lost. About 20 firms have small numbers of apprentices for training and eight companies work together in group schemes, a system which was pioneered in Acton some years ago and to which the hon. Member for Edmonton referred.
In such a progressive area as this, with one industrial company in every six offering training facilities to school leavers, it might be thought that we should have little need of an Industrial Training Bill such as this, but our realisation of the need for the proposals contained in the Bill is probably far greater than it is in many other parts


of the country, because in Acton school leavers represent the only regularly recurring problem of unemployment. It is a temporary problem when it occurs, but no less a real problem for the school leavers. I believe that this problem occurs because, by their nature, school leavers are inexperienced and, of course, unskilled.

Mr. George Lawson: On a point of order. These matters are a great interest and importance and particularly of great interest and importance to Scotland. The name of the Secretary of State for Scotland appears on the Bill and we would expect him—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: That is not a point of order.

Mr. E. G. Willis: Further to that point of order—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. I hope that the hon. Member is not further pursuing the point of order which I have already ruled not to be a point of order. If it is a fresh point of order I will accept it.

Mr. Willis: I was simply about to ask whether you would accept a Motion to report Progress, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, but in view of the arrival of a Scottish Minister, I withdraw that request.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: To begin with, as we are a House and are not a Committee, the question of reporting Progress does not arise.

Mr. Holland: Perhaps, by courtesy of Scotland, I may be allowed to continue and to underline the problem that I was discussing when I was interrupted by re-emphasising that in such a dynamic industrial area there is a steady and continuing demand for skilled people. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that as Acton's Member I welcome a Measure which will seek both to extend and to improve the facilities for training in skills which are as vital to the economy of my own area as they are to the future of our industrial nation.
I hope that the proposed industrial training boards will seek to improve the "know-how" of training in those industries which do not normally operate apprenticeship training schemes as such,

while encouraging an ever-increasing number of smaller companies to cooperate in providing group training facilities, thus increasing the actual number of vacancies available for school leavers to train for useful skills. I agree with much of what my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Mr. K. Lewis) had to say about the length of apprenticeship training schemes. Similar views have been expressed by hon. Members on both sides of the House.
One of the greatdifficulties experienced in some of the expanding industries is to solve the problem of how to increase rapidly the skilled labour force which is dependent for its supply upon seven-, six-, or five-year apprenticeship schemes. The dilution of labour is a palliative which may be employed in times of national emergency, but it is a short-term palliative, and in my view an unsatisfactory one. The real solution would seem to be to produce as quickly as possible, commensurate with the skill required, craftsmen at least as highly skilled as today.
My right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works, on Monday, informed the House of what is happening in the construction industries. The point has also been referred to this evening, and it sets a useful precedent for other industries to follow. The industrial training boards, composed as they are, according to the Schedule, of equal numbers of representatives of both employers and employees in each industry, would seem to be ideally suited to the task of examining existing apprenticeship schemes, to see how, with more concentrated and more efficient training methods, it may be possible to concertina the training a little so as to impart the same amount of knowledge in a shorter time.
I am not suggesting a lowering of standards, but with the vastly increasing numbers of technical college places becoming available, and with the increasing use of scientific aids in teaching and training, in most industries it should be possible to achieve a contraction of the time necessary to produce skilled people.

Mr. J. Robertson: It is time that the facts about this matter were stated. Will the hon. Member believe me when I tell


him that the engineering and shipbuilding employers have refused an application of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions to reduce the period of apprenticeship to four years? It is not the unions which are opposing the shortening of the period of apprenticeship.

Mr. Holland: I did not realise that I had at any stage implied that it was the trade unions who were to blame. Both sides of industry must examine the problem and reach a conclusion suitable to their respective industries. It is not possible to lay down any standard time for all types of industry or training but it is well worth having another look at the schemes which are progressing in various industries. These training boards, which will be concentrating on one industry each, would provide the ideal body of people, representing both employers and trade unionists, to consider the question. That is the point that I was trying to make.
I now want to move from commenting upon the function of training boards to the question of their composition, and to say more than one word about the brief reference which my right hon. Friend made to the professional institutes. I hope that the boards will not neglect the great storehouse of accumulated knowledge that exists today in these industrial and professional institutes. Here I am in agreement with what the hon. Member for Edmonton said. These corporate bodies have long experience in establishing professional and craft standards, in securing the provision of courses, setting qualifying examinations and assisting persons to find facilities for being trained in industry. If that has a familiar ring it is because it is taken from Clause 2.
As an example, I should like to refer to the Institute of the Motor Industry, about which I have personal knowledge. For the past 43 years this body has been fulfilling many functions for which the proposed industrial training boards will become responsible. It has been fulfilling them for what are now almost two industries—the car manufacturing industry and the car servicing industry. It will be little short of tragic if the wealth of knowledge possessed by this institute and similar bodies in other

industries is neglected by these new boards.
Where appropriate, the officers of the corporate bodies could be appointed to serve on the proposed boards, but the institutes must be fully consulted. Corporate professional and craft bodies, by virtue of their long experience, should be in a strong position to offer useful advice on the fulfilment of the provisions on Clause 7.
I do not wish to delay the House, because I know that there are many otherhon. Members who wish to take part in the debate, and we made rather a late start, but I am fascinated by Clause 15, which my right hon. Friend skated over in his initial speech and which, according to the Explanatory and Financial Memorandum, it "clarifies". Putting it into the sort of language that I understand, it seems to say that technical colleges provide technical education. They always have provided technical education—and this applies to technical colleges in Scotland as well as in England and Wales.
Clause 15 aside—and every Bill has its idiosyncrasies—I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the first major piece of legislation which he is piloting through the House. It deals very well with a vitally important subject, and I believe that the Statute Book will be the richer for its inclusion.

6.18 p.m.

Mr. James Boyden: In following the hon. Member for Acton (Mr. Holland) it is interesting to refer to his own area and to what has been taking place in a number of fields where this Bill should very much improve things. I want to quote from Technical Education for September, 1963, which says that in Middlesex in the course of the last two and a half years only 50 apprentices in group apprenticeship courses have beenable to be organised. In the automobile industry to which he referred no success at all was achieved in organising a group apprenticeship course in that industry. It is an industry which is extremely scattered and where the need for this Bill is great. It is a comment on the distance that we have come, during which time the technical colleges and the local authorities have been trying to do this, and the distance that this Bill will have to go in


order to remedy the situation. I hope very much that weshall not hear any more about the way in which the trade union movement has been dragging its feet, because as long ago as 1927 the General Council of the T.U.C. recommended that there should be appropriate compulsory training for all young workers. Certainly the efforts of Mr. Frank Cousins and of the former secretary of my own union, Lord Williamson of the General and Municipal Workers Union, have been very much directed to trying to get the Government to move and they have tried to influence public opinion in this direction. The constant criticism which is made of the trade unions nearly always springs from ignorance of the facts.
The Minister of Education is fond of the quotation from Dr. Johnson, to the effect that an impending execution is apt to concentrate the wits. In the case of the party opposite, the same sort of thing appears to lead to a diffusion of activities over a wide social sphere. In this case the sudden bringing forward of a White Paper and of this Bill is very much evidence of what hon. Members opposite are anticipating. But the groundwork to this Bill has been most inadequately prepared. Just as the Robbins Committee had to draw attention to the lack of data and statistics on higher education—and by implication criticised the Minister's own Department for not having the figures—so in this connection there are serious gaps in the information on which this superstructure of councils, and so on, is to be based. Take the situation of Middlesex, since reference has been made to it by the hon. Member for Acton. The local technical colleges have all found it
incredibly difficult to find out the real size of the problem. The various Government Departments were not able to supply the education committee with the detailed statistics which would tell them the distribution and diversity of industries in the county, with their training pattern, what trades apprentices are engaged in, what firms they are with, and how big those firms are.
The Ministry of Labour said that it would lend its files for the education people to take out the facts. But these straightforward facts were not there, readily accessible for the education people to work on. At the conference

of the British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education on 15th January of this year, one of the leading officials of the Ministry of Labour, when asked about the basis for drawing up these courses and organising the whole system, said:
As far as I know, the only Department of the Government machine which would have the address of every firm is the Inland Revenue, …
and it is not supposed to disclose the facts. So we have a situation in which there is brought forward a comprehensive scheme, and the statistics and data are not available to make the scheme adequately scientific from the word "go". This is bad enough. But there are some serious problems of lack of co-ordination between Government Departments which cannot be washed away by a few words from the Ministry of Labour.
To make this scheme a success and to give certainty to the operation the Minister of Education must do two things. He must declare the date and the method by which the school-leaving age is to be raised to 16. That is fundamental to the problem which we are discussing today. Secondly, he mustgive clear instructions and come to a very definite conclusion about the amount of day release and the form in which day release is to be decided. As things stand, day release is very erratic. I was pleased to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) refer specifically to the good work done by the nationalised industries in this connection. Looking at the statistics of the Ministry one finds that day release varies from industry to industry and the amount has no relation at all to the profitability and success of an industry.
For example, no one can say that the distributive trades are not prospering. Yet they have one of the lowest figures for day release among boys in the country. It is 7.6 per cent. The allied industries that they serve, food, drink and tobacco, are extremely prosperous. But the figure is only 16 per cent. There is the figure for insurance, banking and finance. These are very prosperous, but they release only 8.9 per cent, of their young male employees. It is imperative not only that the Government should take a decision, a broad decision at the


top so that the system may be organised, but that at local level, at the actual working level, day release and industrial training should be integrated.
As the situation exists at present, there is no indication of how existing facilities may be arranged. There are only four places in which building may be found at once for industrial training and day release. There are the technical colleges; the workshops of the firms; buildings which may be acquired by the council, and possibly some odd places which may be found here and there. But the whole basis of organising this, if we are to have an efficient system, is that there should be the closest co-operation and a complete plan devised of what buildings are necessary and where they may be found.
With reference to trainers, the Minister of Labour was disappointed with the Bacie courses arranged for training officers and that there were not many takers so that the course had to be abandoned. Why does the right hon. Gentleman find this so surprising? He said sweet words about encouraging training officers. But his own Department has appointed a retired colonel as the principal industrial adviser for this Bill. He may be an admirable retired colonel, and I am quite sure that he does not beat his wife, but the fact is that little effort was made to recruit training officers. The advertisement for this post appeared only in the Engineer and Engineering and not in the educational journals or the sort of journals which training officers would read. This is the sort of discouragement which has been experienced by training officers for a long time and so it ill-becomes the Minister of Labour to say that he is disappointed when his own Department sets such a bad example.
In another and a more major sphere, the Government have certainly not created an atmosphere in which the trade unions, the rank and file unionist, can be satisfied automatically that what is done in training may not on some occasion threaten them. Mr. Frank Cousins has set a good example in this connection by pressing for extended industrial training, putting the problem back to the Government and asking what they are doing to secure the industrial position of the workers. For example, he says:
We have tried consistently to defend both the young and the old, particularly in developing proper training for people who may have to change their jobs.…One of the things trade unions have consistently opposed is the idea of having young workers played off against older workers.
This Bill should have been accompanied by severance pay legislation and by schemes for regional development. Only by building up a feeling of complete confidence will it be possible to carry many of the rank and file trade unionists further forward.

Mr. Ellis Smith: Hear, hear—I am one of them.

Mr. Boyden: This the Government appear to ignore completely, which gives rise to the suggestion—much as we welcome the Measure—that this Bill is being brought forward as a piece of electoral window dressing. Had the Bill been prepared six or seven years ago and had the groundwork then been done properly, or even had the ground work been done properly recently, there would be much more confidence among hon. Members on this side of the House that the Bill is a genuine attempt to grapple with the problem and that the Government are going to see it through, come what may.
I want to say a word or two about the way in which the educational system should fit into this. Hon. Members will agree there has been a considerable move forward in awareness among educationists on the problems of industrial training and the need to interest the schools more in this field. A great waste of talent has been going on in education and also in industrial training. The Crowther Report is very much pushed on one side in these days, but a statement in that Report needs emphasising again and again. It refers to technical education and says that not only
is this a largely unknown territory, but also …an area made dark by unnecessary educational casualties.
The reference is to the best and most energetic of young people who come forward for evening studies and further education to improve themselves. The failure rate and the difficulties are enormous. In this Bill we are discussing the rank and file of the population, "Half our future." They have been completely ignored in this matter. The Newsom


Report, as was said in the debate yesterday, has been pushed into the background. The Crowther and Newsom Reports are absolutely basic for an advance in this matter, both in the coordination of the system and to get the very best from the talent which we have.

Sir E. Boyle: Before the hon. Member wallows too much in his gloom, has he nothing to say about the 1961 White Paper on better opportunities in technical education? It was a White Paper designed to meet precisely these recommendations in the Crowther Report, and the effort to bring them into effect has had considerable success. If the hon. Member is not to say anything about that. I shall.

Mr. Boyden: I concede that something has been done, but the fact is that it was done in 1961 and should have been done years before. I have with me the Minister's Answers to one of my Questions about pre-apprenticeship courses and group apprenticeship courses. There has been a move forword, but it has not been far enough in view of the need. If when he winds up the debate the right hon. Gentleman announces the date of the raising of the school-leaving age, I shall be delighted to find that he is moving on the most important question of all.
To come back to the educational Reports, both the Crowther and Newsom Committees were very work-conscious. My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton referred to recommendations of the Newsom Committee dealing with the question of getting teachers to take more interest in work. One recommendation is that children in their last year at school should be engaged, at least for a short time, in industry. There is also a recommendation on the root of the problem of finding training officers. It is that teachers should themselves have better contact with industry.
Training officers will be difficult to recruit if there are not more opportunities for teachers to take part in industry and to bring their experience in teaching and industry together. There have been no suggestions at all about how the Government propose to recruit an adequate number of training officers. I have had considerable experience in

this matter both in the Air Force and at the Admiralty. One of the tasks which faces any educationist embarking on a new field, especially when it concerns industry, is to persuade many shellbacks—and they are found in all walks of life—that training is anything but a frill. I constantly came across civil servants who thought that the best way of training a civil servant was to let him get going at the deep end and fend for himself.
There should be the maximum publicity and interest put forward to get over this hump. I am sure that trade unionists, certainly over the last 20 years or so, have set a very much better example than many of the smaller employers. Often the bigger employers are in the van of progress, but the rank and file trade unionist, considering what is involved, has shown a more altruistic and generous attitude than he has been given credit for on the benches opposite.

6.35 p.m.

Sir Ian Orr-Ewing: I feel that I might almost crave the indulgence of the House for a fresh maiden speech after seven years spent on the Front Bench.
It was said earlier that we are all in need of modernisation and, apparently, we are all in need of retraining. The hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) suggested that in engineering people ought, up to the age of 40, to go back three times if they were to keep up to date. Perhaps the same principle should apply to Ministers, because I found when I went back to industry that tremendous changes have taken place during the last seven years.
I shall not detain the House for very long, because I always felt, when I was on the Front Bench, that speeches tend to be too long. I hope to keep to the principle of not speaking for more than 15 minutes on any occasion.
I always feel, when studying the problems of industry, that we do well to consider what is happening in countries which are our rivals competing with us in the export market. In the training of their young people they may be leaving us behind. We need to consider the time taken to train young people, the area covered and their quality, because if we are not doing as well as


other countries that will be to the detriment of the prosperity of our country.
In this country the training of engineering craft apprentices takes five years. In France, it takes three years, in the Federal Republic of Germany three years or three and a half years, and in Italy three years. I have not the latest figures for the United States, but they are of that order and are substantially shorter than those in this country. I do not believe that this is because our young people are any less intelligent, less quick or less thoroughly trained, but I think that we ought to examine the question to see that we are getting the best in the way of training apprentices, because if not we shall have a falling number of young people prepared to do a solid five years' training.
In a young person's life five years seems "an age". When we are older we look upon it more lightly, but if we ask a young person to do five years' training it is a strong discouragement when he finds that he could perhaps do that training in three years.

Mr. J. Robertson: The hon. Member should give the rest of the story. For instance, in France, although a boy serves a three-year apprenticeship he is not accepted as a skilled man in industry until a much later date. In fact, he works for five years at less pay. The same is true of Germany. Will the hon. Member tell us what essential difference there is between a boy having to wait for perhaps more than five years before he can command a skilled rate and a five-year apprenticeship?

Sir I. Orr-Ewing: I concede that there are differences when we may not be comparing like with like and there are slightly different arrangements. We might examine this question to see whether we are not viewing it from the point of view of the Luddites.
When I went back to industry I was struck by the fact that apprentices in tool rooms were doing wonderful work after three years' apprenticeship. They were often doing better work than some of the old hands. We should examine this question very carefully. The hon. Member for Edmonton said that the Amalgamated Engineering Union had agreed to shorter courses. I know that there has been a long process of nego-

tiation and the former Minister of Labour helped to encourage a reexamination of this matter. I believe that it has been agreed that there shall be a more flexible view taken about the age limit.
I was informed by the previous Minister of Labour that "even less has been done in the engineering industry." He said:
After nearly two years of discussion it has agreed in principle on making ages of entry more flexible but has not yet touched the question of shortening apprenticeship. Such snail-like progress has disappointed me.
If we work on this from all sides of the House, we may get things moving faster, and this would be to The benefit of our young people.
Let me compare the figures in the building industry. We all know the immense amount of work which the building industry has to undertake in providing schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and new, modernised houses. We look very much for improved methods of training in the building industry. But here again the period is four years, to which it has been reduced in some regions, and five years moregenerally. In France it is three years, in the Federal Republic of Germany three years, and in Italy three years.
We ought to examine these methods. Will my hon. Friend, in reply to the debate, tell us whether this kind of information will be made available to the boards so that they can examine their own ideas and make sure that we are using the best and quickest possible methods? The school-leaving age has been rising steadily over the last fifty years, and surely there is a cast-iron case that as the school-leaving age goes up by one year, the length of the apprenticeship should be automatically reduced by one year. If the school-leaving age is raised to 16, perhaps we can automatically reduce the apprenticeship period by one year.

Mr. Albu: That is exactly what has been agreed in the engineering industry.

Sir I. Orr-Ewing: Does the hon. Member suggest that the apprenticeship will not be changed until the school-leaving age has been raised?

Mr. Albu: It has been agreed for those who stay on at school.

Sir I. Orr-Ewing: I do not think that we ought to be complacent. The case for improvement exists now. Let us try to improve the situation now and not wait for the Government of the day to bring that change about.
I know that there are some shellbacks, if I may borrow the phrase of the hon, Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden), among employers as well as among the trade unions, and I know that it is an advantage for employers to get skilled labour—because these people are skilled after three years—at a cheap rate. But I do not think that we can allow the boards to be influenced by these shellbacks, whether they come from the trade union side or from the management side. We must do our best to get these youngsters trained quickly and efficiently.
I have been examining the results achieved in the French scheme, and here I particularly turn to retraining because all hon. Members have made the point that it is essential that young people should realise that if they learn a skill, this country canprobably guarantee them employment for the rest of their lives, but it cannot possibly guarantee them employment in the same task. I should particularly like, therefore, to deal with the question of retraining.
The French have an excellent method in that they allow ages of entry for retraining between 17 and 46. That is very realistic. Why should we bar the older people, who have perhaps another twenty years of useful and active life, from learning a new job when their present job becomes less valuable to the community?
Will the boards give a diploma at the end of their training? This is done in France. The "Formation Professional des Adultes" issues an F.P.A. diploma, and 95 per cent, of the intake leave with diplomas. In French industry they regard the standard of these people after six months as almost as good as those who have done a full three-year apprenticeship course.
How are these people to be paid? In France, they are paid the minimum wage in that trade, and, in addition, they are given subsidised meals and free

lodging. This seems a realistic approach. Is the same sort of approach to be achieved as a result of the Bill?
I believe that the Bill is a positive move forward which can benefit our young people. By training them quickly and retraining them when it is needed, it will be to the great advantage both of the people themselves and of the country.

6.45 p.m.

Mr. Harold Finch: This Bill comes late in this Parliament and even if it is expeditiously dealt with in Committee and becomes law, I do not think that it can be effective for some time. But there can be no doubt that it will go a long way towards improving industrial training in this country, and in that respect I welcome it.
Its success will depend upon the vigour and the energy which the Government and the training boards put into the Act, and, above all, it will depend upon the personnel involved. I hope fervently that those who undertake the tasks on these training courses will do so with enthusiasm. Reference has been made to colonels dealing with training. I hope that we shall not have any Colonel Blimps or people like them on the training boards. We want men with experience of industry and of education and with plenty of drive—men who are prepared to face the responsibilities and difficulties of what will be a big task.
If the Bill is exercised fully it can revolutionise industrial training in this country. There will be difficulties, but difficulties exist to be overcome. I therefore fervently hope that in making these appointments we shall bear in mind that we need men with vision and boldness to face up to industry and to the trade unions and who can come to the best possible arrangements so that the Bill is a success.
There will be no excuse for those who are appointed to the training boards or for the Government, because there was never a Measure which was looked forward to in the country as much as this. The Federation of British Industries and the Trades Union Congress have pointed out the importance of an improvement in industrial training. Many manufacturers have been telling


us from time to time that foreign competition is increasing and is becoming keener, and that among other things there is a need for more and more skill. On both sides of the House, we say, we recognise that the pattern of industry is changing. At the same time, we know that automation is increasing.
On this side of the House for some years we have pleaded for a remodelling of the apprenticeship system in this country. We have done thisin the Scottish Grand Committee, in the Welsh Grand Committee and in the House. At last we have this Bill. In other words, the training boards and the Government start at a great advantage, with the full support and sympathy of both sections of industry, of parents and of others. There was never a committee about to be set up which started in such a fortunate position as this. They will also have the advantage of the apprenticeship schemes already operated by the nationalised industries.
The National Coal Board has an excellent training scheme. Boys are away for 12 months on full-time education and after that for three or four days a week, coming down eventually to one day a week. It is an excellent scheme, and it is needed in that industry because mining,like every other industry, has been highly reorganised. We have an experiment in the Nottingham coal field towards manless coal faces. There would be very few, if any, face workers required, and it would be only a question of pressing a button. It will be a question of mechanical and electrical engineers producing the coal at an ever-increasing rate. The National Coal Board realises that it has to adapt its apprenticeship scheme to the changing conditions in the country. These comments apply equally to the gas and electricity industries. The training boards will have the benefit of the experience and knowledge of the nationalised industries, which lead the way in this matter.
Some firms in the steel industry and firms such as South Wales Switchgear and British Nylon Spinners have a fund of knowledge at their disposal. They will be able to help the new training boards when they are established. There will be no excuse for lethargy on the part of the training boards or the Government. The

nation is behind the intention and spirit of the Bill. It is up to the Government to clear the decks for action, because it is action that we want.
The Bill takes on an added importance from the fact that week by week the country is losing the skill of many boys and girls.Many of them are taking up dead-end jobs. The ability of thousands of them is being frittered away. It is becoming more difficult for unskilled boys and girls to get jobs which offer them proper security. Something needs to be done urgently. It is regrettable that the Government did not see fit to introduce this Bill long ago, especially as the Labour Party has for a long time advocated the remodelling of the apprenticeship scheme. In my own county—Monmouthshire—in September, 1963, there were5,666 unemployed. Over 3,000 were men. Seventy-five per cent, of them were unskilled. Fifty per cent, of them were between 18 and 39. In Monmouthshire the emphasis used to a large extent to be laid on finding employment for those over 50. The emphasis is now changing. It is now recognised that the greatest problem for the foreseeable future is with young men and women. The county has 1,042 unemployed boys and girls.
I hope that the training boards will provide facilities for the unskilled who are at present unemployed or who are in employment but have lost the opportunity, because the Bill has not been introduced until now, of getting into a skilled occupation. We owe a duty to the many young people who up to now have failed to get training because there has been no co-ordination between employers and the Ministry. Some firms have not been interested in apprenticeship schemes. The financial position of other firms has not been such as to enable them to grant day releases, although day releases are not very satisfactory. In any event, some firms have not been in a position to grant day releases for the purpose of apprenticeship schemes. Efforts have been made by some by way of pooling arrangements. At any rate, the training of boys and girls has been held back because many employers have not been able to take a sufficient number of apprentices. In future, industrial training must not depend entirely upon the number of apprentices an industry or an employer


can take. The Central Advisory Committee on Technical Education in Wales said this:
There is no doubt that at the present time the provision of technical education in Wales, measured by the demands of industry and by the number and quality of the students who present themselves, is more than adequate.
It is more than adequate because employers have not been able to take apprentices, or have not taken sufficient of them.
The existing training centres should be expanded to take additional trainees where employers are not able to absorb them. I hope that the Minister will pay special attention to this point. If this job is to be done efficiently, training centres should be enlarged. Are all young workers to be regarded as in training? Is it the Government's intention that there should be periodical releases of all young men and women for further education? Such training schemes should include girls, because at present the provision for the training of girls is inadequate. Many girls have the ability to take on skilled work. Some industries in South Wales have taken on girls in skilled occupations. The girls have made a good job of it. I hope that the Minister will tell us whether it is the ultimate intention to include all young workers in training schemes.
One of the functions of the boards should be to establish standards for training and syllabuses for technical education. In future there will be a need for adaptability. Processes and techniques are changing rapidly and on a scale hitherto unknown. This means that young people should not be trained in a single process or a single technique. They should be able to apply their knowledge to different processes and techniques. That should be the aim of the training boards and the Ministry.
We must be on our guard against being too examination-ridden. At present, in many aspects of training young people there is a tendency to be too examination-ridden. I call the Minister's attention to this fact because I believe that one can be too rigid. Boys and girls going in for the National Certificate do so in three stages. There are three subjects in each stage—that is the minimum. Many boys

and girls sitting for this examination pass in two subjects with flying colours, but they come to grief on the third subject. Although they are able, they fail in one subject. They have attended well and have earned good marks in the other two subjects. The fact that they have failed in one subject means that they have to go through another 12 months in the three subjects. When a person has failed in one subject, I believe that he should pass on to the next stage in the subjects in which he has proved himself competent and go on concentrating upon the subject in which he has failed.
The present system causes much wastage. I know cases of many boys and girls who have despaired on learning that for another 12 months they must go on with three subjects, two of which they have passed already. If they come from homes where the earnings are low there is a great temptation to give it up. Many give it up before reaching the final stage of the National Certificate. We do not want a repetition of that in this scheme. I do not suggest that we should lower standards, but we should not be too rigid. I hope that the Minister will give some advice on this matter to the training boards and use his influence to ensure that this does not happen.
Some boys and girls are not good at paper work. Some who are of average intelligence or perhaps slightly below average are very good with their hands. This type of person is educable. The Newsom Report laid emphasis on this in this way:
There is very little doubt that there are reserves of ability which can be tapped if the country wills the means.
Newsom also says this:
There is a substantial proportion of the average and below-average pupils who are sufficiently educable to supply the additional talent which the future will desperately need.
We must have in mind at all times those boys and girls who are not above average but who can make a very valuable contribution in industry if they are properly trained.
I was glad to hear the Minister say in opening that in appointing the training boards due regard would be paid to regions and that regional boards would be established. This is important, because circumstances vary from region to region. The circumstances in Scotland are different from those in


Wales. The North-East has its own problems of unemployment. I was glad to hear die right hon. Gentleman say that regional committees are to be appointed, what may be termed subcommittees of the national training boards.
In this way local circumstances will be fully taken into account. We shall have a regional board for Wales. The circumstances in Mid-Wales and North Wales are quite different from those in South Wales, which is highly industrialised. North Wales and Mid-Wales are highly agricultural: light industries may be necessary there. It is highly desirable that there should be a training centre in North Wales and Mid-Wales, as well as the enlargement of that in Cardiff.

Mr. Godber: The hon. Gentleman will appreciate that it will vary according to the different industries. For some industries there will clearly be a case for area committees in South Wales because of the needs there. In other industries there will be different arrangements. There will be this degree of flexibility in operation, which should help Wales.

Mr. Finch: I appreciate what the Minister says.
There is one other point. That is the function of the youth employment officers in connection with future training. The youth employment officers are doing a very efficient job. They are the liaison between the schools and the employers. In my own district, employment officers interview parents, headmasters and teachers and arrange for boys and girls to go into factories before they leave school, so that they can see how the work is being done. The youth employment officer is the key person in this respect. I do not know whether the Minister has in mind that youth employment officers should be represented on the training boards, but I think that it is highly desirable that some representation should be arranged by which these employment officers can act through the training boards as a liaison between employers, industry and schools. In my own constituency boys and girls periodically visit South Wales Switchgear and other factories so that they can get an understanding of the factory atmosphere and make up their

minds later whether it is the type of industry in which they would like to be trained. The youth employment officer who is doing the job is a very important person and he should be of great benefit to any training board.
I hope that this Bill will soon become law. Once it becomes an Act of Parliament it can revolutionise industrial training, provided there is the drive. The decks must be cleared for action. The training boards and the Government must go into this as if they mean business, with a boldness and confidence, because it can do so much for industry. There will be difficulties, but I am sure that the trade unions will do everything possible to make this Measure a success for the sake of the children and the economy of this country.

7.7 p.m.

Mr. Aidan Crawley: The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) said that the Bill was part of the electoral shop window. I commend it for almost exactly the opposite reason—not only for what it does for industrial training, but because it is part of a continuing process of creating new institutions for our industrial life. To me, that is by far the most important task ahead for any Government over the next decade.
In the debate on the Address in reply to the Queen's Speech, we discussed the future of Britain and we disagreed about many things. But we are all agreed on one thing: whatever our future, it depends for prosperity on a substantial increase in production, and whatever emphasis is put on new investment or the proper use of plant, in the last analysis it always comes back to the human being. It is the quality of the men and women, whether they are managers, scientists, technicians, or mechanics, on which we depend. The importance of the Bill is that it recognises, as was recognised by another Measure, passed last Session, that traditional methods of ensuring the quality of the men and women in industry and, even more important, the way they work together, are no longer adequate.
As the hon. Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) who opened the debate for the Opposition said, there have been innumerable instances of firms which have no schemes for training. It is


equally true that, for whatever reason, there have been many instances of trade unions refusing to adapt their apprenticeship schemes and actually rejecting schemes for training in production. The idea that the two sides of industry can be left any longer to work things out for themselves cannot be accepted.

Mr. J. Robertson: We have had many statements of this kind about the trade unions. Would the hon. Gentleman give one concrete case as an example of what he has said?

Mr. Crawley: There have been several examples in the printing industry of restriction of apprentices and also in the railway industry, if the hon. Gentleman cares to look them up.
This inadequacy of leaving things to the two sides of industry is not confined to training. It shows itself in far more important things:in the slowness with which management and unions accept new methods, even in wage negotiations. The machinery is too slow. It often results in deadlock, and even when it gets a settlement, either through arbitration or through the last-minute intervention of my right hon. Friend's Department, the settlement is temporary and, however it may affect a particular industry or particular employers, it frequently conflicts with the national interest.
I know that the Opposition are as aware of this as I am, but their remedy is for the State to exercise increasing control through nationalisation, or the buying of shares in existing companies. [Interruption.] There is no evidence whatever that in the nationalised industries the clash between management and worker is any less than it is in private industry. We have the same pattern in the railways, docks and Post Office of negotiations and deadlock and then a temporary settlement, as we have all through private industry.
The truth is that in the nationalised industries the position when represented by management is something just as remote to the ordinary railwayman as it is to a shareholder in a private company. We shall not get better co-operation through nationalisation. The main difficulty in creating new institutions for our industrial life is that the two chief institutions of our industrial life are both out

of date—the limited liability company and the trade union as it stands.
We often hear the directors of even some of our greatest companies say that their first duty is to their shareholders. In most of our main companies the shareholder is infinitely remote. In fact, a director's first duty is equally important, if not more so, to the thousands of employees in his company and the consumer as it is to his shareholders.
The same argument can be applied to trade unions. "Ted" Hill is only one trade union leader, but how often do we hear other union leaders say, "Whatever the national interest might be, I must look after my own members first." In view of the size to which trade unions have grown, it must be of equal interest to trade unionists to look after the interests of members of other trade unions and the consumer.
Our duty is to create institutions which will allow companies and trade unions to exercise social responsibility as well as responsibility for their members. It is because I believe the Bill to be another step in this difficult process of creating new institutions for our industry—however much hon. Members opposite may dislike it—that it has my full support.

7.11 p.m.

Mr. John Robertson: The Bill will be welcomed by all right-thinking people in industry, if only because the powers proposed to be given to the new boards will enable us to have the true facts about training in industry. This may save us from the sort of crystal-gazing that is indulged in by amateur sociologists.
Training in industry has been a fashionable subject for some time, a subject about which everyone is an expert except the chap who works in industry. The so-called expert seems to take it for granted that the worker knows nothing about the topic—just as the hon. Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. Crawley) showed his lack of knowledge of the subject. If anything was guaranteed to create bad feeling in industry it was his ill-thought out speech in which he revealed that he has had little experience of working in any section of industry. We can do without that sort of speech.
The speeches generally today have shown that we must get the facts clear, particularly about apprenticeships and the attitude of the craft unions. The Minister must make up his mind. We are told, on the one hand, that our training is not good enough and is not producing skilled craftsmen in sufficient numbers, while, on the other hand, the Minister claims that in one of his new training centres he can produce skilled men within six months. Time will tell.
There is far too much generality about the quality of our training. I hope that the new boards will discover the facts because, for example, in my constituency the number of engineering apprenticeships represents a one-to-three chance. South of the Border it is about a one-to-six chance of a youngster obtaining an apprenticeship. The. fault lies mainly with the large factories in the Midlands—the car and aircraft industries. However, do not let us be too critical of these two industries because, traditionally, they have never given many apprenticeships. They have undertaken a different kind of training; they have taken people out of dead-end jobs and those who have found themselves redundant because their jobs no longer exist—miners and so on—and have turned them into engineers.
About 70 per cent, of the men who do the effective jobs in the motor car and aircraft industries are non-time served. I would not like to say that they are not skilled, but when we speak of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled men let us remember that this sort of terminology in the engineering industry is not related to the kind of job a man does but to the basic rate of pay to which he is entitled.
When I hear people talking about increasing the number of apprenticeships as a solution to our problem of the lack of skilled men in engineering I wonder whether they know the true facts of the situation. About 60 per cent, of the engineering personnel in Britain are non-time served and do not require to serve any period of apprenticeship. It is reckoned that another 15 per cent, are unskilled, so that only a very small number of those employed in engineering are required to serve an apprenticeship.
If the Minister is considering training adults in one of his training centres for six months so that the trained man will

then do one of the jobs that is normally done by a five-year apprenticed man, need he wonder why the unions are objecting? But if he is talking about training a man to do one of the jobs which is normally performed by a non-apprenticed man, there will be no objection.
We have heard a lot about wastage in industry. I agree that there is a good deal of wastage. One of the reasons for it is that a skilled man—having served five years'apprenticeship plus a pre-apprenticeship year, making six in all-having spent a number of years on small apprenticeship wages, finds that his job does not require the skill he learned during his apprenticeship. In other words, because of the difficulties at present confronting negotiations that take place in industry to establish decent rates of pay for a skilled man, the unskilled and semiskilled worker is often able to get higher wages than the skilled man. This often happens in the Midlands, and because of this we find a five-year time-served man doing a job that could be done by a non-time-served man. I agree that the Government cannot do everything to solve this problem. But it comes badly from the benches opposite—the occupants of which often represent employers' interests, including the interests of engineering—to blame the trade unions for all the ills of industry.
There has never been a restriction on the age of an apprentice. I agree that we have frowned upon adult apprentices, men of, say, 20 or 30, working for apprentices' wages. If an employer is prepared to pay the skilled rate for the job being done we will do all we can to assist. As to dilution agreements, the trade unions have never been difficult in their upgrading policy. It creates a wrong impression and a feeling of resentment among trade unionists when the amount of co-operation which they have given in this sphere is not recognised.
Several hon. Members have spoken about the length of apprenticeships. The Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions recently made a direct claim to the employers to establish a four-year apprenticeship. The Confederation received a fiat refusal. I appreciate the point of view of the engineering employers. The problem has never been that of the standard of training, or even of training itself, but of the


age at which an apprentice should start and the wages he should receive when the four-year apprenticeship is over. I finished my own apprenticeship at the age of 19, but I did not get a journeyman's wage until I was 21. An employer is quite prepared to reduce the apprenticeship period to four years as long as he does not have to pay the journeyman's wage until the age at which he pays at present.
When does the age of learning cease in an engineering factory? The only difference to an apprentice between the day of die termination of his apprenticeship and the day after is the amount of money to which he is entitled. Very often he is doing the same job in the last two years of his apprenticeship; he is a skilled man, but working for very low wages. If anyone can induce engineering employers to pay the fully-skilled rate at the age of 19 it will be found that the unions will make no objection to termination of apprenticeship at that age.
The problem is not the quality or quantity of training during an apprenticeship, so let us face it quite squarely. As I say, my own union called the employers'bluff on this quite recently but at least it made some progress, because now every year spent at any school prior to apprenticeship up to the age of 17 will count as apprenticeship; in other words, apprenticeships will still terminate at age 21 but may be of three, four or five years' duration. On the other hand, we must remember—and I am now dealing only with the Scottish position—that of the 80,000-odd school-leavers each year 72,000 leave before the age of 16, so that the number going into apprenticeships after the age of 16 will be very few, and I do not think that that will make any real contribution to the problem.
The Minister spoke of certain instances where the trade unions are being blamed for being Luddites. They are not Luddites. A colleague of mine has told me that the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor in office said to him, "For goodness sake, go and kick them where it hurts most in order to get them to reduce the period of apprenticeship during my term of office." Unfortunately, my trade union has been unable to meet the then Minister's wish, though we have gone a long way towards doing so.
We are anything but Luddites. We have for years been trying to sort things out, and perhaps with the setting up of these boards we may at last be starting on the road towards the solution of the problems. But the problems will never be solved by discussions on training. They will only be solved by discussion on status and wage rates. This is the central problem of the content and length of apprenticeship, not abstract questions of training.
The Minister anticipated one criticism of the Bill by saying that this legislation will not alone ensure success in training. It will not. This is the Bill's greatest weakness. It assumes that by the imposition of levies, and by giving something back to the employer who carries out the training, the employer will be induced to undertake training, but there is no guarantee that he will. It may well be that he will find it cheaper to pay the levy and not undertake the training, hoping that the Minister himself will undertake that task.
This is one of the dangers of this set-up. I believe that the training must be the responsibility of the industry and must take place in industry, but the Bill will have misfired if employers believe that the training is far too expensive, or are prepared to pay a levy and put the responsibility for the training on the Minister. That must be guarded against. Unless employers undertake more training, the Bill will not have been a success.
I say that industry should undertake the training, but there are probably some exceptions. We have heard about the regional problems, and I should like to know what the Minister has in mind for providing training facilities for the remoter areas, such as the Highlands of Scotland. There must be many boys and girls in the Highlands who can never hope to find work at a skilled occupation. How are we to link them with industry for apprenticeship and the kind of commercial training from which they could benefit? This is an area where, perhaps, the Minister himself could set up training centres without relating the training to any specific factory or firm. Nevertheless, I do not think that, in general, this should be looked upon as a good thing.
It is a pity, too, that the Government did not undertake a great deal more spade work before introducing the Bill. Instead of getting off to a clean start when the Bill becomes law, the boards will have to do research, build up statistics, make forecasts and consult the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland to determine what kind of educational facilities are required. It will take a long time for the machinery to operate.
Forecasting future needs must be the cornerstone of any training policy. As it stands, the Bill does not specifically allocate that task, although I must say that in the Report—Central Scotland: A Programme for Development and Growth, the Secretary of State seems less coy on the subject than was the right hon. Gentleman this afternoon. The Secretary of State makes definite statements about the kind of work being done. For instance, he says that Glasgow University has been asked to make a survey and a report on the probable needs of certain industries in Scotland The Report also states that the Minister himself has asked certain other people to produce a report on future needs in training. The Minister of Labour might today have been a little more forthcoming in telling us how the work was to be done, and what he had in mind.
Is the machinery set up by the Bill necessarily the best available? My hon. Friend the Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) spoke of plumbers on the North-East Coast, and of typists. Whether a typist is employed in a solicitor's office, a steel works or any other factory her training will be fundamentally the same. Would training in industry really achieve what we are looking for, or would it not tend to restrict the scope of the training? Should we not think of training a young boy over a wide range of skills not related to the industry at all but to skill? Agreed, in a number of cases the training will be related to the industry. I hope that the Minister is able to achieve the flexibility he has said is his aim. I hope that he tries to play this by ear. There should be no rigidity in the way the boards operate. In time we may be able to make a better judgment of the situation.
I agree that the Bill in itself means nothing, because so much depends upon the personnel who form the boards and so much depends upon the Minister giving the necessary impetus and offering the initiative to get things going. If the Bill does the job we envisage it will be a good Bill, and not only for industry. The needs of industry are not the most important aspect of the matter. The Bill will be a good thing for young people. It has my blessing.

7.31 p.m.

Mr. John H. Osborn: I made my Second Reading speech on the Bill, as it were, on 1st February. I welcome the new Minister who, in piloting the Bill, takes over a task at a critical stage. I should also like to congratulate my right hon. Friend's predecessor on the hard work which he did in connection with the Bill. My right hon. Friend emphasized the need to increase communications within industry. This is the correct theme to apply to the whole problem of training. It involves not only the State but both sides of industry. The project envisaged in the Bill will succeed only if we have increased communication and understanding between both sides of industry.
As the hon. Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) said, in this legislation we are exploring a new area and have to feel our way. The hon. Member for Paisley (Mr. J. Robertson) said that the Government had not done enough spade-work. I agree that spade-work is necessary, but in making that complaint one cannot at the same time criticise the Government for not having brought this Measure forward earlier. I welcome the concept that lies behind the Bill. I emphasised in my speech on 1st February, and I have emphasised since, the various snags involved. There are still snags and difficulties. We should not have any illusions about that.
The Minister has done a great deal of work behind the scenes since he delivered his first speech on this subject. I welcome the way in which he has consulted all sides of industry. Many people who will be affected by the Bill are now much more aware of its impact on their industries and their methods of training. In the industry with which I am connected, for instance, the Iron and Steel


Federation says in one of its publications that
The Industry fully supports the Government's proposals whose objectives coincide closely with those which it itself has followed; and welcomes the prospect of the establishment of an Iron and Steel Training Board.
This is one example of the type of work which has been going on in industry. Like many other industries, the iron and steel industry could have stayed on one side and could have said, "This is something which the Government are doing. We have our own scheme". I congratulate my right hon. Friend and his predecessor upon their valuable work in securing support for the Bill when it becomes law.
I have attended several meetings on the subject of training in industry. Some of them have been with training officers and others with union representatives and education authorities. There is no doubt that those in industry who are concerned with training alone are almost wholly behind this Measure. They have experience not only of problems which they have to face in their own work, but also of problems which are beyond their control.
My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. Crawley), who is my Member of Parliament, raised the question of management being involved in this project and of the attitude of management towards its shareholders in tackling it. In this context, he said that the proposals in the Bill were not window-dressing for an election but that they might well work the other way. The Minister is only too well aware that there are many in the management of the smaller industries who have no idea of the impact which the Bill will make on their industries when it becomes law. I congratulate my right hon. Friend and his predecessor on having grasped this difficult nettle at this time.
The Bill makes impositions on management in areas which some will regard as the prerogative of management and as areas not to be interfered with by others. One of the difficulties which we shall have in Committee will be to explain to many people affected by the Bill the full reasons for its impact on their industries.
The carrot and the stick have been mentioned. Clauses 6, 7 and 8 deal

essentially with the penalty for failure, which involves both imprisonment and fine and which, in the last resort, affects the individual. This creates problems, but I think that we can rest assured that those who accept responsibility for running industries and working on training will realise that the penalty will be only a last measure. This aspect of the Bill should be played down. The positive aspect is the immense fund of good will towards the Minister and the Ministry in their efforts to make this concept succeed.
We come back, therefore, to the most important question, which is whether we need a Bill of this kind. My qualified reply is that we must have the Bill and that it will have the support of many who are in responsible positions in industry. I have just come back from a tour of the United States where I have tried to explain to Americans not only the concept of economic planning, which undoubtedly is distrusted there, but also the concept of this Bill. There is no doubt that American management in its present mood would regard a Bill of this kind in the United States as transgressing on the responsibilities and the province of management.
Many of those to whom I spoke, including representatives of responsible management, realised, however, that we in Britain are following something which is not unlike the pattern followed in France and Sweden, by means of which we may well succeed in bringing about a more efficient industrial set-up in this country. We should therefore take the more positive approach of appreciating that co-operation in this effort has advantages and we should discount as far as possible some of the negative aspects of the Bill.
We should remember one special reason for having the Bill now. I believe it to be the most valuable reason. Many private companies have run their own schemes for both apprentice training and management training. They have undergone the expense of granting day release and paying the fees of those who have undertaken courses, as well as paying wages and salaries during their absence from work. So far so good, but many of their competitors do not do this and, in the end, training can be an overhead expense on the operating cost


of a factory and might have to be charged against the cost of the product. This does not matter except when there are other producers who do not have that kind of charge on their product. It may on the other hand be said that there is the compensating advantage of having a more highly skilled labour force and that this counteracts the cost.

Mr. Bence: It does.

Mr. Osborn: Many people who are engaged in management hold that opinion firmly. There are others who have their doubts about this. This is surely something for each individual management to judge, but those who run schemes of this type resent the way in which, having spent money on training young people, they find that these people can be taken as highly skilled men by their competitors. This point has been concerning many progressive managements in industry.
Many ideas have been put forward to deal with this objection. One is for some extra tax relief for those firms which operate training schemes. Another involves the concept of a transfer fee. The final concept, which is mentioned in this Bill, is that of a levy. This means that those firms which do not have a training scheme paya levy. We have discussed today the weight of that levy. It must be high enough to make it worth while for those firms which operate training schemes to continue to have those schemes. I welcome the implication in the Minister's remarks that those firms which have very good training schemes may find that the grant far exceeds the levy. In fact, they are being paid for training people in their own industries. This is an aspect of the Bill which is to be welcomed.
If I now appear to be critical, I shall try to be critical in a constructive rather than a destructive sense. In the White Paper "Industrial Training: Government Proposals", paragraph 18 states:
The definition of industries for inclusion in the Orders setting up Boards would have to be worked out in detailed discussion with those concerned in the industries affected.
The question I ask is: have we reached the stage whereby we have managed to cover every young person entering employment? I think the answer is probably no, because it will be difficult to make certain that every young man

going into employment enters some field of employment covered by a board, and I would welcome some comment from the Minister on that point. I am a little concerned that those employed in Government service are left out of this category, though I welcome the Minister's assurance that Government Departments will give adequate training to their employees.
One aspect of the Bill which is a little obscure is: what is the definition of an employer? I may have been blind, but I have been unable to find in the Bill an employer defined as someone employing a given number of people—I had expected this to be five. Any clarification as to how big an employer is intended to be covered by the Bill would be of immense value at this stage.
I have also noticed a change in the concept of the industrial training committees to which the Minister referred. I observe that the chairman may be either inside or outside the industry. I am glad there has been this change of concept from the original one, because in many cases there could be an immense advantage in not debarring a person who has worked in a particular industry.
Having set up our training facilities, who will form the secretariat? Who will be the training officers? Reference has been made to the B.A.C.I.E. Conference, and some of the training officers have not supported it. We must be careful to ensure that the officers working on these boards are men of the highest calibre. It is no good having a training officer who knows nothing about what happens in the industry with which he is supposed to be concerned. In fact, we might be demanding a sort of superhuman person who is almost impossible to supply.
Having selected these training officers, what is to be the mechanism of deciding whether or not a company has adequate training facilities? It might be said that a company should have facilities which comply with the City and Guilds requirements or some other requirements. One company might be operating successfully and might say that its training facilities are adequate, while another company might have much more elaborate facilities and still claim that they were adequate or, indeed, more


than adequate. Who is to decide whether firm A has the right training facilities whereas firm B has not? Is it to be the industrial training committee or its secretary? I hope that in the course of time, particularly as the collection of a levy is involved, a way will be found of making equitable decisions so that individual firms do not have ruffled feelings.
This is perhaps the most difficult field into which the State is moving. I was discussing with various competent training officers in my own city the sort of training schemes which are taking place there. Several of them agreed with me that the bigger companies have spent a vast amount of money on training operatives as such to a much higher standard than on other firms training craftsmen. Who is going to judge in this matter? Is an education officer competent to do so? Certainly, if examinations are involved it may help, but one firm may concentrate on operative training in the wider general field whereas in craft training the firm may be concentrating on specific skills. These are problems which we must not ignore.
In this context of having adequate people on these boards or attached as training officers to these committees, suppose for instance that someone on a committee goes to a firm which considers it has an adequate training scheme. I have spoken to one training officer who has told me that unless he is satisfied that the person nominated to inspect his firm—he has been in charge of training for, say, 25 years—knows what he is talking about, he is not going to treat such a person very kindly. This is the sort of friction which we must work hard to avoid.
I should like to take up a point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, North (Sir Ian Orr-Ewing) on retraining and redundancy. I raised this matter on 1st February in connection with work done in Sheffield, and particularly work carried out by the National Trades Technical Society. I shall not cover the same ground again, but I said on that occasion, when considering a craftsman and a qualified operative, that it is the duty of the management or of the industry concerned to maintain the interest of the craftsman or the operative
in his industry and the new processes in that industry.
This is a field in which the National Trades Technical Society has done immensely important work by bringing the top management into discussions with operatives so that they can bring themselves up-to-date with the processes involved. Many of these people would not be in a position to comprehend a normal lecture, but they can understand a demonstration.
What happens if a craftsman in this position is declared redundant and. after twenty or twenty-five years in one skilled trade, he is transferred to a new field of activity? That man must first have his interest aroused in a new form of activity. This is the sort of task which is being carried out by this society, The work has been started in Sheffield within the last six months, though more progress has been made in the Birmingham area. The point that concerns me is: what happens to this voluntary organisation which is supported by subscriptions from employees as well as from employers under this Bill? The employer says, "I have got to pay a levy to this training board. Why should I pay a levy or subscription to another society as well?" I raised this matter in a debate on 1st February.
Clause 2(4) says:
An industrial training board may …(b) make grants or loans to persons providing courses or other facilities approved by the board".
I take it that this is a field where some outside agency which co-operates with the Ministry of Education and provides facilities like this may ask for funds from the board, and I think this will be a very great reassurance to the National Trades Technical Society and other societies.
I come quickly to one or two other details. Clause 2(2) speaks of contracts of service with a training board rather than with a company itself. Normally, an apprenticeship is between a company and a boy, and I should like an adequate explanation of how this proposal is going to work.
Then there is the question of regional activity in apprentice training. In Sheffield, for instance, the local area officer of the Iron and Steel Federation


and the Engineering Employers'Confederation have worked very closely together in what I call general education. It will be very complex if the regional organisation is ignored and we deal entirely with these vertical training committees I hope that, whatever emanates from this Bill, regional cooperation between representatives of the Ministry of Labour and the youth employment officer and the industries concerned will not die because of this vast vertical national structure which will be imposed on them.
I am interested in the work of youth employment officers, and I would support what was said by the hon. Member for Southwark about how little we know of what happens to people when they leave school. I have had a series of meetings with people concerned with this, including youth club leaders. In my own area. We find that the only people we can trace, or begin to know what has happened to them, are those going to approved apprenticeship schemes within industries which we know. I think that from the last statistic available this amounts to about 36 per cent. I hope we shall be able to find out what is happening to the 64 per cent. On both sides of the House we are concerned not so much with those going to approved training schemes in the larger companies as with those others who may not have found proper training. This Bill is a move in the right direction, but unless we have within its orbit everyone employed or to be employed I still think we shall make very little progress in overcoming this major difficulty.
I have tried, as I said I would, to point out the difficulties constructively, and I would conclude by saying that, with those reservations, I consider this is a bold venture in the right direction, and I support the Bill.

7.53 p.m.

Mr. Tom Bradley: Like other Members who have contributed to the debate, I should like to begin by saying that I most sincerely welcome the general intentions which are contained in the Bill we are discussing this evening, although I think it rather a pity that it has taken so long before these proposals could be found

a place in the Government's legislative programme.
After all, it is over five years since the Carr Committee reported, and it reported a deteriorating situation in industrial training. To be fair, I do appreciate and realise, of course, that talks have been going on between the Ministry and both sides of industry for a long time. These talks have been accelerated since the publication of the Government's White Paper last December.
I recognise, too, that the Bill, as it is now before us, is different in some respects from the views put forward in that White Paper, and I also appreciate that those differences represent concessions to the points of view which have been urged on the Government for a long period of time by the Trades Union Congress. There is, first, the provision of the Central Training Council. It has long been urged on the Government by the T.U.C. as a very necessary part of the administration of industrial training. I should like to think, however, that it would be in a position to give more strength and direction to the industrial boards than the Minister indicated in his opening speech this afternoon.
The second point, I think, where a concession has been made to the T.U.C. is that, in addition to the levies paid by employers throughout industry, there is now to be a considerable injection of public money. In fact, we know that an initial amount of £50 million is to be available for this purpose.
I was very pleased to hear the Minister say this afternoon, regarding the provision for educational representation on the training boards, that it was recognised that further education and industrial training are really two complementary aspects of the continued education of young people after they leave school. I was very glad indeed that he went out of his way to imply that.
But it is to the actual work of the industrial training boards that I wish to turn my attention. I think that, while an improvement in apprenticeship training is undoubtedly necessary, and also in the structure of that training in industry, because at present there is a collection of unco-ordinated decisions which have been made by a large number of


firms in a private capacity, the boards should not neglect the training in whole ranges of lesser skilled occupations.
In spite of the Minister's explanation, I am still wondering how it is proposed that the boards will deal with the very many skills which cut right across industrial classifications. It is quite possible to think of many industries whose skilled personnel is common to the whole field of British industry. Who, indeed, is to define the boundaries of the chemical and engineering industries? It has been said somewhere else—I believe, in another place, in a debate on the White Paper—that there are more skilled electricians in other industries than there are in the electricity industry itself.
One category of workers comes immediately to my mind as common to all industries, and that is the clerical workers, some of whom may be aspiring to the lower and middle ranges of managerial and executive status. The emphasis, in the Bill, in the publicity which the Bill has received, and also in the contributions which have been made to the debate today, seems to be on the manual skilled worker, the craft element, the craft-manual element, in industry today.
I would say, as a national officer of a trade union which caters for salaried employees, that I hope it is not the intention to exclude clerical workers from the full provisions of the new proposals, and certainly, if it is not the intention to exclude them, I hope it is not the intention to put them at the back of the queue.
I do not think that we should look at this problem of industrial training without considering the whole field of industry and commerce, and that is why I was so glad to find, in Clause 1, the term "commerce" used, because it did not appear in the White Paper when it was issued.
Clerical and other white collar workers now form a growing proportion of the total number of employees in all industries. May we look forward to a board which will cover clerical employees in particular industries or groups of related industries, or will there be a board to cover the whole field of clerical employment? I should

like answers to these questions at the appropriate time.
It is desirable that the pattern for clerical and commercial training should be unified. We must aim at getting a common standard. Already, we have the ordinary national certificate in business studies which is available in colleges of further education, but for clerical and commercial people in industry the growing need has been for something at a level lower than this ordinary national certificate. I was glad to note recently that a new certificate in office studies is being introduced. I think that this will fill a large gap in the training arrangements for clerical workers within industry and commerce.
We must ensure that the industrial training boards recognise these courses at further education establishments as the normal study arrangements for clerical workers everywhere and that adequate provision is made for day or block release. It is astonishing that, in 1961–62, only 12 per cent, of the 15 to 17-year-old group were accorded day release by their employers. The Ministry of Education has emphasised the importance of day release and has pressed employers to recognise it, but the industrial training boards, when established, must give a little more direct encouragement.
The record of nationalised industry generally is good—in many respects, nationalised industries have been the pacemakers in industrial training arrangements—but it is only fair to add that many large private firms also have a good record in this direction. There must, however, be more national direction to secure better training arrangements coupled with day release.
I was rather alarmed when the Minister was at some pains to point out in his speech that, as regards commerce, he was empowered, but not obliged, by the Bill to set up a training board. I hope that its establishment will not be too long delayed. If some time must elapse before a separate training board can be set up to cater for clerical and commercial workers, could not the proposed Central Training Council tackle the general question of training within commerce, since it is not really restricted to one industry?
In much of the thought about training within industry there is, perhaps, a natural concentration on the needs of young people. I do not complain about this and I do not wish to depart from it, but, on the other hand, training within industry should not, I suggest, be confined to young people. The pace of technological advance today calls for many new and changing skills and requires training provisions in industry beyond mere provision for the young. Any schemes should, therefore, make provision for retraining within industry. The boards should apply themselves to the problem of retraining skilled men whose old skills become redundant in an entirely new situation.
British Railways, the industry with which I am most closely associated, have a first-class record in this connection. They have been extremely successful in retraining engine drivers, whose working lives have been devoted to steam traction, to drive the new forms of diesel and electric traction. Men, even up to the age of 60, have been quite successfully trained in these new skills and operations. The redundancy arrangements for the workshops of British Railways which have recently been published envisage retraining for redundant staff. There was no mention whatever in the White Paper of the problem of redundancy which is one of the most pressing and harrowing throughout industry today. Will the boards pay attention to it? I sincerely hope that they will.
Industrial change, of course, is not confined to the manual side of industry. Many changes are taking place in the offices of commerce, insurance, banking and finance. There is the tremendous development of the large-scale computer. A tremendous amount of mechanisation is creeping in. Clearly, there is a great need for the training of existing office staffs to become programmers or to work in the arrangements necessary as a consequence of mechanisation and the introduction of computers. Training is related to productivity and economic growth, but it involves something more. It implies, also, a widening of the outlook as part of the development of general further education.
I do not believe that we can begin to solve the problem of providing adequate

and relevant training unless we have a background of full employment. Otherwise, there is bound to be resistance within industry, a resistance which may possibly be too great. The trade unions have a perfectly understandable fear of too many trained people being produced, with no jobs for them when they have been trained, while employers, on the other hand, adopt the quite understandable attitude that they will not undertake training programmes if they have absolutely no confidence in the future and no order books full for as far ahead as they can see.
It is essential, therefore, that, in preparing any plans or schemes, the industrial training boards should accept fully that it is vital that men, once trained, must have a place. If we can guarantee a fully employed economy, the provisions of the Bill, which we shall improve if we can, will, I am sure, make a positive contribution to better industrial relations, understanding throughout industry, and opportunities for the people within industry.

8.8 p.m.

Mr. Dudley Smith: I agree almost entirely and wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed by the hon. Member for Leicester, North-East (Mr. Bradley). If Imay say so, his was one of the more constructive speeches we have had in the debate. For too long, our apprenticeship system has been out of date, untidy and, in some cases, exploited. I believe, in spite of some of the expressions of opinion today which have given them a rather lukewarm reception, that my right hon. Friend's proposals are realistic and imaginative, and that they are well in keeping with the idea that we should try to modernise Britain.
There is an urgent need for cohesion and for firm guidance in regard to apprenticeship in industry, and I believe that the Bill will provide what is needed, even though there may be snags which we shall discover as it passes through Committee.
It is essential to overcome the lure of highly paid unskilled dead-end jobs which are always so superficially attractive to the young. It is very difficult to put over the point to them that, in later years, young people will rue the day


when they went into unskilled employment. Apprenticeship must always reveal and emphasise the opportunities which will be available in later life, and it must somehow capture the imagination and interest of those who take it up. The Bill will make a valuable step in this direction.
There is a good deal of frustration and disillusionment among young people who continually change their jobs. They do it to their own detriment, and they finish up in blind alleys. This is one of the tragedies of the twentieth century in highly organised employment.
I think that it is undeniable that a reliable pattern of skilled craftsmanship must be established throughout industry if we are to remain competitive and, as has been emphasised today, if we are to establish ourselves in overseas markets and continue to succeeed economically. Flexibility is always important in these matters and many hon. Members have referred to the extent of technological change and automation.
We shall find that skills which today are completely relevant will, in due course, go out of fashion and will have to be replaced by others. We must teach people with the skills of today the skills of tomorrow. We should have wide-scale "refresher" courses in industry as there are in some other walks of life. Pilots, doctors and teachers are constantly bringing themselves up to date in their vocations, and surely, if it is important for a professional man to be au fait with what is going on in his occupation, it is equally important that we should have modern trends developed among skilled workers.
There must be more research into training and training techniques, and I am glad that the boards will be able to conduct such research. That is an important part of the Bill. I support the idea that five-year apprenticeship schemes are a little unrealistic. I find that this varies from industry to industry, and, of course, with highly complicated machinery one cannot put young people in charge in a comparatively short space of time. But, with new methods and ideas, I am certain that concentrated courses, with all the new techniques we could bring to bear, would surely provide the answer and would equip young people in a relatively

short period so that they would not have this dreary, weary five-year stint referred to so realistically by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, North (Sir Ian Orr-Ewing). Five years, at the age of 18 or 19, as he pointed out, seems an extremely long time compared with what it seems in later life.
I also welcome the educational aspect of the Bill. I am glad that that is being emphasised not only in speeches, but also by the fact that we are to have the reply tonight by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education. Surely education is vital to this Bill. It is wise to have a number of education representatives appointed to these boards. They are not too close to the subject and they can bring to bear a point of view which is unbiased and which can be very helpful.
There is a corollary to ordinary apprenticeship. I want to see a greater advance in advice and guidance on careers. We all know the "flyer" in the sixth form who will, in due course, get a good job in industry and eventually earn £3,000-plus a year. He gets the right sort of guidance because he is a brilliant pupil or student. So, of course, do others who go on to jobs such as accountancy, the Civil Service, or the medical profession.
We, must, however, provide more help for the not-so-brilliant youngsters. It must be informed help and must fit in with the new concept of apprenticeship. How many children of 15 or 16 really know what they want to do? A tremendous number do not and would benefit from proper advice. I am sure that at least one-quarter of the working population are in the wrong jobs. I say that with a certain amount of deference, because I think that it is a dangerous thing for any politician to say.
But, even so, I believe that many people have greater potentialities than have been taken account of, and would have benefited from the terms of such a Bill as this in years gone by. I know that the work of the youth employment officers is very good. Many do admirable jobs. But outside the public schools, careers masters are often haphazard in their approach. They have too many other tasks to carry out, with the result that this is just an additional burden on them and they cannot concentrate on it as they should. I hope,


therefore, that this link with education will go on as the Bill comes into operation.
Like the hon. Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter), I would like to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary for Technical Co-operation, whose Committee's Report on this matter really set the pace and. the standards for the Bill, in co-operation with the White Paper which came out towards the end of last year.
But, unlike some other hon. Members, I do not think that it has been too long delayed. There was the need to achieve unanimous agreement on both sides of industry. It was essential to have the right climate in order to gain the unanimity expressed today. One of the most relevant recommendations of the Carr Committee was:
The responsibility which an industry collectively has for the training of its young workers must in effect be a responsibility which is shared by each firm in the industry Firms which are unable to provide training themselves might make some other contribution towards the cost of training the skilled workers their industry requires.
This sentiment was underlined in the White Paper and I am glad that it is now incorporated as the levy and will be imposed on recalcitrant firms. Along with other hon. Members, I also hope very much that the levy will not be so small that some backward elements in industry would rather pay it and opt out than provide a scheme.
I hope that the training boards will constantly keep in front of them the question of the quality of training, because I think that this is one of the really essential bases of the idea behind the Bill I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Labour emphasised this.
In supporting this necessary move, we must not regard industry on too narrow a front. Here I agree with the hon. Member for Leicester, North-East. This is not purely a matter for craftsmen and manual workers. Industry today has a very broad concept and embraces a vast number of talents. I agree with the hon. Member that we must look to clerical workers and others who do not necessarily operate machines or work in factories.
For instance, in my own constituency there is a whole range of industrial

subjects, because the Great West Road runs through it. The firms along the Great West Road make a vast array of products and all of them are important to the country's prosperity.
Many hon. Members have emphasised the importance of retraining and this is perhaps the most crucial of all when we talk about industry. This can, I am sure, be vital as a new dimension to industry in the second half of the twentieth century.
The nation has been brought up in the post-war years to accept full employment—in many respects, rightly so—a choice of jobs and alternative employment, particularly in the prosperous areas—although, unhappily, there are other areas where skilled men are competing for employment.
With the climate of full employment, retraining will become one of the biggest political and industrial challenges we shall face in the next decade, whichever political party is in power. We must, therefore, keep the question of retraining in the forefront. We must make sure that there is greater mobility of labour, particularly among people over 40 who still have a vital contribution to make to working life.
I hope that the Bill will, in addition to stopping the exploitation of some apprentices, make entry into some industries easier. I do not wish to be unduly controversial, although one or two hon. Members have been, because I believe that it is out of place in a debate on a Bill largely agreed by both sides. But there are some industries which are easier to enter than others.
As some hon. Members may know, I work in the newspaper industry. It is no secret that it is extremely difficult for prospective entrants to get into the printing industry, particularly on the newspaper side, unless they have very good contacts: either relatives or friends, Every industry should be open to those who wish to go into it and who will be able to bring their skill to bear and make a contribution.
The country's long-term industrial prospects are essential to our continued prosperity and undoubtedly the Bill will have teething troubles. But, given good will on both sides of industry, I am quite sure that it can be made to work.


Valuable work is already being done in a number of sectors without the aid of the Bill, as has been mentioned by some hon. Members.
One hon. Member hoped that women would not be overlooked or excluded by these provisions. Happily, in my constituency we have a living example of how young girls are being assisted by the National Institute of Housecraft, at Brentford, to which the Minister of Labour makes a generous contribution on behalf of the Government. It is a semi-official organisation, of course. It is an excellent example of how today young people can take on a job which at one time was looked down on, domestic service, and put it into skilled operation and make a success of it.
These girls are trained for a year at the headquarters of the National Institute of Housecraft and then do a year's field work. At the end of that time, they take their City and Guilds examination and the majority are then fully equipped to take reliable and responsible housekeeping jobs in hospitals, schools and other institutions and to earn good salaries with good prospects.
The purpose of education is to equip the coming generation for a fuller and more satisfying life and to make useful and responsible citizens. The purpose of apprenticeship and training must be to equip the young with skills from which they can get satisfaction and interest, besides merely earning their daily bread, and which can aid the country's prosperity and standards. The Bill marks a sound advance in the right direction and I am glad that it has been welcomed on both sides of the House. I hope that we shall be able to speed it to the Statute Book.

8.21 p.m.

Mr. J. T. Price: It is a pleasant and all too rare experience for me to be able to say with hand on heart that I sincerely welcome a piece of Government legislation. Having been here a few years, I sometimes think that I have the privilege of a ringside seat at a performance of the Mad Hatter's Tea-party. Tonight, however, we are meeting in a happy, amiable frame of mind and in an atmosphere of good will to welcome something which we

should have approached more practically years ago.
I am not complaining of the delay, but in giving my support to the Bill, which obviously needs to be trimmed in Committee, I must say that my support is based on two major inferences to be drawn from the Bill. The first concerns a situation which still exists in many industrial areas. To make a constituency point, in my own part of industrial Lancashire, there is the tragedy of children leaving school at the comparatively early age of 15 and then being left for months and sometimes for years without anybody being willing to employ them. No greater injury can be inflicted on youth by a modern society than to turn children loose from the school door at 15 to face the asperities of modern life without a job.
It is no use plaintively drawing attention to juvenile delinquency and so on if we create a situation which impairs and injures the adolescent mind which, after all, is at its most impressionable stage. I welcome the Bill because it will give facilities for the further training of those unfortunate sections of our school-leavers who are still walking the streets months after a time when they ought not to have been turned out of school without a job to go to.
The second inference has already been mentioned. At this time of the debate, it is virtually impossible to make an original contribution. Hon. Members have rightly drawn attention to the evil of blind alley occupations, the superficial attractions of having jobs which are relatively highly paid for a year or two, but which lead only to the casual labour market when industrial conditions become more difficult. If the Bill makes some contribution to the avoidance of the perils and injustices of juvenile employment, by training children to fit themselves for useful occupation and by abolishing or mitigating the evils of blind alley employment, that alone justifies it.
I leave my hon. Friends and those hon. Members opposite who are sufficiently interested to hammer out the details in Committee, but I take this opportunity, without labouring the matter too much, to pay my tribute not only to the nationalised boards of the four major sections of our public
economy, the railways, the mines, electricity and gas production, which have made tremendous contributions to the training of apprentices and others with high skills, but also to the private firms who have had training schemes for years.
I know that much criticism has been advanced from these benches on this and other occasions about the small firms, especially in the manufacturing industries, which have not made a proper contribution totraining and apprenticeship schemes. This is especially true in engineering. That is because many of the very large units, like Metropolitan-Vickers, A.E.I., Lever Bros., I.C.I, and others, as well as the nationalised boards, have themselves been traininggrounds and institutions providing a pool of trained labour for the smaller units who have got it for nothing. If we complain that so many sectors of British industry have neglected their moral and economic responsibilities to their employees in this respect, it is only because the economic system as at present operated has allowed those who have neglected their duties to society to take advantage of the good employer who has met his.
In setting up this new machinery and exercising the system of a levy on industrial training, we must be careful that we do nothing to undermine or damage the arrangements of existing firms who are making such an important contribution to the system. Without elaborating it, there may be a situation in which the existence of a notional levy of some fixed amount might influence some people, already paying far more money to train their own staff, to opt out of their own schemes and enter that under the control of the Central Training Council.
This may be circumstantial, or hypothetical, but we should always remember that where any kind of over-riding body, dispensing public money, steps into the field, many people who are doing excellent voluntary work may step out. It would be a great pity if that sort of thing occurred. I do not want to elaborate the point further, because the hour is late and other hon. Members wish to speak. I do not propose to develop those points beyond saying that there are a few later Clauses which deserve special atten-

tion in Committee, and I shall refer to them in passing.
As a Lancashire Member, perhaps I may refer to the special provision made in Clause 13 to deal with the cotton industry. I understand that it is the Government's intention that special exemption should be given to the industry to manage its own scheme of training, and that it should not be governed by any of the regional boards envisaged in the earlier Clauses. I know that we had the Cotton Act which provided for a levy of £30 million to be administered by the Cotton Board. We need not go into that story tonight. My only purpose in mentioning the point—and I do not oppose the idea; there may be good administrative reasons for it—is to draw attention to the fact that if the present Government policy towards the cotton industry is continued much longer confidence in it will sink to such a low ebb that there will be no prospect of attracting young people into it for training under a council, the Cotton Board, or any other body.
The little shot that I am about to fire is only mildly critical of the Bill. If hon. Members opposite seriously wish the Bill to provide better opportunities for training future cotton operatives and executives to run this formerly great industry, we shall need further economic assistance, apart from the Bill, to bring forward the pool of trainees which it envisages.
Clause 16 contains special reference to the National Insurance Fund. In the Explanatory Memorandum, which does not form part of the actual Bill, the Minister, by some kind of computation or estimate made in his Department, suggests that the Minister of Labour would be authorised, with Treasury approval—which is sometimes difficult to obtain—to set up these training boards and to spend up to £50 million out of money provided by Parliament. That is a large global sum. I do not know how many years it is intended to cover, but it is an attractive piece of bait. I hesitate to indulge in polemics tonight, because other people have referred to election shop windows. I do not wish to drop any kind of red herring or to cry stinking fish, but it is necessary to know over what period that £50 million is to be


spread. Is it for the next fifty years, the next five years or the next ten years?
The Clause contains a significant reference to the National Insurance Fund. I am not clear from the terminology what it is intended to convey. It says that under the existing Employment and Training Act, 1948—which is not being discussed tonight—the sum of £500,000 is provided out of the National Insurance Fund. This Bill intends to increase the contribution made out of that Fund to £1 million. That will have to be done by way of Statutory Instrument. The Clause goes on to say—
or such greater amount as the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance may from time to time by order made by Statutory Instrument determine.
This is a nice piece of elastic. Politicians are always being criticised for collecting vast sums of money for one purpose and employing that money for another. Nothing is more significant than the criticism, now being directed against the Minister of Transport, that the levy made under the Road Transport Act is being used not to build roads but for all sorts of other purposes.
If we give power to the Government to make an indent or a subvention on the National Insurance Fund, we are entitled to know how far that Fund is being placed at risk. I have given my support to the general purposes of the Bill, and I sincerely hope that it will soon be on the Statute Book and make the sort of contribution that we require in the national interest, but I do not agree with Clause 16. It seems to give indefinite powers to any future Minister of National Insurance—subject to Treasury approval—to cover part of the cost of this Measure by way of a levy upon the National Insurance Fund.

Mr. Whitelaw: rose—

Mr. Price: The Minister may care to rise to speak, but I propose to sit down in a moment because I have nothing further to say. I emphasise what I said about the merits of the Bill; I welcome it warmly, and I hope that my party and my colleagues will give it every support.

Mr. Whitelaw: I think that the hon. Gentleman will find the answer to his

last point in the speech of my right hon. Friend.

8.35 p.m.

Captain Walter Elliot: My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary has dealt with the last point made by the hon. Member for Westhoughton (Mr. J. T. Price) and I will not take it up. I hope the hon. Member for Westhoughton will not consider me discourteous, if I say that I do not intend to follow him closely. I profoundly agree with him that even if the Bill did no more—I think that it will do a great deal more—than enable school leavers to be trained properly and avoid dead-end jobs, a great deal would have been achieved by this legislation.
I appreciated what was said by the hon. Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) that when there is so much talk about modernisation from hon. Members on both sides of the House it is significant that the first Bill introduced in this Session deals with training. That is my opinion is putting the priorities right. It is on training, particularly of our young people, that we shall achieve modernisation I have no doubt that my right hon. Friend realises that he must carry both sides of industry with him and I was glad to hear that his proposals have been well received and that discussions are proceeding satisfactorily. If my right hon. Friend forms his boards and they do not do anything and have to be replaced, we shall find ourselves in difficulties.
My object in intervening in this debate is to broach one or two questions which come to my mind. The first concerns expense. I am sure that the expense incurred in implementing the provisions in this Bill will be worthwhile, and certainly industry will be a willing animal. We have had contracts of service, we talk of redundancy payments and now we are discussing training. I hope that the grants to be made to firms to reimburse them for the levies will be on a generous scale. I am not clear whether the grants will make up what the firms have to pay in levies, but I hope that payments will be generous.
I hope that it will not be regarded as a controversial statement if I comment that as the employers will be


asked to put up money and the Government will provide a big sum, consideration might be given to the question of the trade unions putting up some money. This is not something entirely onesided. Only the employer and the employee members will be able to vote on the imposition of a levy. I suppose that the imposition is one thing and the actual spending of the money another. But if the trade unions put up some amount of money, they would be fully subscribing members with the right to discuss impositions and to say how the money should be spent. I am sure that that would strengthen the position of the unions.

Mr. J. T. Price: I accept that the hon. and gallant Member does not wish to be controversial, but surely if he follows the logic of his suggestion he will see that if this were practicable—which I do not for a moment think it is—and the great trade unions which are holding large funds made some contribution, the only people who would qualify to benefit would be trade unionists. Many people in this country, I regret to say, are not members of trade unions. The Minister would face an awkward dilemma if it were suggested that he should admit those who were not members of trade unions because part of the financial cost would be covered by trade unionists.

Captain Elliot: I do not wish to take the point too far. I can see advantages to the trade unions, particularly if they were generous and farsighted and did not concern themselves too much with whether young people being trained were at that time trade unionists or not.
I was rather sorry to hear that Government establishments would not be included in this training scheme. They are big employers of labour. Presumably they get a certain number of trained men from industry. In many respects they run equivalent industries to those in the private sector. A sphere which springs immediately to mind is dockyards. The Royal Dockyards build ships—mostly warships. I do not see why they should not be brought in. It would be a great advantage, and this point should be considered further in Committee.
I am slightly worried about the duties of the Central Training Council.

When the hon. Member for Southwark was speaking I thought I detected some reservations in what he said. It occurred to me that the T.U.C. is inclined to have difficulty if it trespasses into the field of which an individual union considers its own business. I wonder if he had that in mind. Clause 11 lays down the composition of the Central Training Council. There is to be an equal number of members from the employers' organisation and of representatives of employees and others. I hope those representatives will be on a high level. If they are not, one can imagine that the Central Training Council in advising the Ministry of Labour might find its advice at cross purposes with perhaps the main employers' or employees' organisation.
The Minister of Labour referred to representatives of the Ministry of Labour or the Ministry of Education or of the Secretary of State for Scotland having a right to attend meetings of the training boards. I am not quite clear what he meant by that. For what do they attend? Are they merely to listen, or to take part in the discussions? I think they ought to take part. Government contracts go out to industry on an enormous scale and Government representatives are very much interested. This is a big item. I link it with the fair wages resolution.

Sir E. Boyle: I answer my hon. and gallant Friend's point about what these representatives will attend for immediately. They will attend as assessors like, for example, a number of Government Departments have assessors on committees on one subject or another. I doubt if the reports of many committees would reach the form they do but for the advice of assessors, but I think it wise that we should not discuss too much in public what goes on behind the scenes.

Captain Elliot: I take my right hon. Friend's point, but I am inclined to feel that with such enormous contracts coming from one authority, as they do from the Government, that authority is very much interested, or should be interested, in the training structure of the industry with which it is dealing.
We have a fair wages resolution, which means that an industry or firm


to which a Government contract is given must adhere to accepted standards of wages and conditions. I do not see why we should not link with that a certain standard of training for the men in that industry. This is another reason why the Government representatives should sit on these training boards in their own right, able to express their opinions.
With these questions, however, I, like all other hon. Members, welcome the Bill, and I hope that we shall give it a very speedy passage through the House.

8.46 p.m.

Mr. Merlyn Rees: As one who has until recently been engaged in a very minor way in industrial training, I agree with all those hon. Members who see the Bill as a very necessary step forward in a technical-social programme to meet the needs of the second half of the twentieth century. I should like to ask some questions of the Government Front Bench and to make some suggestions to them.
One of the first problems in implementing the Bill will be that of defining what an industry is. I take the point of the Minister of Labour who says that there must be a flexible approach; it may differ in different industries. But whatever decision is taken will be an arbitrary decision. I remind the Minister of Labour that it seems as though discussions are taking place by N.E.D.C. for little N.E.D.Cs., which will be of an industrial nature. In my view it is very important that the industrial training boards should be related to these little N.E.D.Cs which are being discussed at the moment. It is not only a question of administrative niceties, for of all examples of education as a form of capital investment, training of this kind is, I think, the most important and the most easily seen. In my view it is important that there should be some connection with these N.E.D.C. industrial boards if, as I hear, there is talk of their being set up.
The Minister also stated that there is a chance, in some industries at least, that there will be set up regional sections or regional industrial training boards. Once again he made the point that there should be flexibility. At the moment there is no sign that the ideas on

regional planning of the Lord President of the Council have yet sprouted any regional institutions, but it could happen, and here again it would be necessary for the industrial training boards of a regional nature to bear this possibility in mind.
There is in being the very valuable research unit of the Ministry of Labour which investigates future manpower problems. It is important that this, too, should be related—I deliberately use a vague word—to the work of the Central Training Council, because it will have to bear in mind the future needs of the country's industry. I also ask whether any thought has been given—although I have listened carefully I have heard no reference to it in the debate—to the place of the Government training centres, which play such a valuable part, and can continue to play such a valuable part, in retraining. Should they not be associated with the industrial training boards rather than remain in isolation, as they might if they remain in their present form?
The Minister of Labour in his opening speech made the valuable point that education in the schools and education for training outside the schools are complementary—that there is a close connection between the two. Hon. Members on both sides have mentioned the implications of the Newsom Report on training in secondary schools. Several passages in the Newsom Report emphasise that more stress should be laid on the technical aspects of training inside secondary modern schools.
I should like to bring one or two points to the notice of the Minister of Education. Many teacher training colleges lack the correct attitude to technical training. It may be possible to associate colleges of technology with the training of teachers. For example, I hear that one college of technology was ready for some students who have now gone to the university. That is the sort of thing about which my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition spoke last night. I should have thought that we could increase the supply of teachers by doing at least a one-year course in a college of technology, perhaps to be followed by a two-year course in a teacher training college. Then the attitude of teachers to technical training


might be put into the right perspective. I personally believe that there is much to be said for amalgamating teacher training colleges with colleges of technology permanently, because they have much to give each other and, in my view, much to give to industrial training.
Careers masters perform a valuable task, but it is a bit of a hit-and-miss job in most cases. I should like to see some form of block release into industry for teachers doing careers work in schools. I do not think that I give away any trade secrets when I say that such block release could take place towards the end of the academic year, with great benefit to each side. Speaking as one who has spent some time in industry, I believe that it would be a good thing if teachers worked in industry for a short while just to see what it is like on the inside and to learn the social attitudes which exist inside industry.
Concern has been expressed about the small firms, particularly those in engineering, which do not employ training officers. Is there not a case for lecturers in colleges of advanced technology taking a job, on a part-time basis, advising these small firms on their training programmes? This would enable men in the colleges of technology and technical colleges to keep closely in touch with practical industry.
I should like to see representatives of teachers' organisations on the training boards. I should like to see practising teachers on the training boards. I should also like to see representatives of youth employment officers on the training boards because, in my view, they belong to a most underrated profession.
Continuing this line of the connection between training and education, if industrial training is regarded, as it should be, as a continuouseducational process which starts in the schools, I do not believe that apprenticeship should start at an arbitrary time. I believe that it is wrong to select a child for secondary education at the arbitrary age of 11. It is equally wrong to make a selection at some arbitrary age for apprenticeship training. If the period of apprenticeship is cut as I believe it will be—hon. Members on both sides have emphasised this; my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley (Mr. J. Robertson) raised some

trade union problems which deserve consideration—this will provide one of the first problems for the industrial training boards. If the period of apprenticeship were cut, employers should not cut further education. If the period of apprenticeship were cut to three or four years, a young man should not then be deprived of the opportunity of day release to a college of technology.
The Crowther Report and other Reports in recent years have given chapter and verse for the fact that the pool of ability among working-class children, in the accepted sense of the term, is not being used. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said last night that they are not even knocking at the door. In my view, one way of liberating the ability which exists is by a technical education in the secondary schools—not an inferior type of education but a realisation that the old approach to some children is falling on deaf ears. I should be the last to denigrate what has been done in recent years in certain secondary schools, including that which has been done in the City, part of which I represent in the House. Industrial training can do a great deal to liberate the ability that is there. When it is liberated, later there should be facilities available for men in their twenties to pick up formal education where younger and more fortunate children followed on at the age of 16. Adult education in a wider sense is very important.
I want to say a few words about the content of the training which is to take place. It is apparent from Clause 2(1,a) that this is not an apprentice training Bill. This is a good thing. It is one of the best points about the Bill. We are considering education in the wider sense of the term.
I want now to mention again something I mentioned in my maiden speech—the training for shop stewards that takes place in the motor car industry. One of the best things that the Ministry of Labour has done in recent years, in association with employers in the motor industry and the trade unions concerned, has been to set up day release courses for shop stewards. This has been done in a variety of ways. I played some part in what was done in Luton. It is an excellent firm there anyway, with very


good trade union relationships. It was done at the college of technology, perhaps in a formal way. At Oxford, there was a different approach through the extra-mural department, where they did far more to create face to face situations in order to train a shop steward for his job. Nor must we forget the great work done by some trade unions in this respect, particularly the Union of Municipal and General Workers.
In my view, this is a job which the industrial training boards could do on a wider scale. This is spreading in the Luton area from the motor car industry. It is important that such courses should be neutrally organised. The first students on the course I have mentioned referred very freely to "brain-washing". After I had been taking the course for a week or two, they perhaps found that that was not the case. These courses should be extended on a wider front.
In this respect there is the problem of education of foremen. We did some work in this respect as well. The perpetual complaint of foremen is that they do not really know what their job really is. Many foremen told me that, as a result of the development of joint consultation, if they wanted to find out what was going on, they went and had a chat with the shop steward, because he found out first. Indeed, the chain of communication in many large firms is quicker through the union tree than it is through the normal management chain of communication. It is important that the training of shop stewards, the training of foremen and management education—call it what one will—should be done by the industrial training boards.
I regret that there are no courses for local government people, and particularly I am sorry that there is not a management course for the education industry, if we must call it such. One of the problems that has arisen in many of the social services in recent years is that they have a modern task to perform with an attitude of mind and machinery that arose out of the fact that they were born of the Poor Law. This is particularly true of education. I have received from the Ministry of Education details of the Further Education Staff

College at Blagden and of courses organised by colleges of technology, but I would like to see an industrial training board for the Civil Service. I hope that the Bill will make speedy progress, particularly because industrial training has become a community responsibility. The logical development will be that all young people will be regarded as being in training.
On a somewhat personal note, as someone recently employed in the teaching world and lookingfrom the world outside, one tends to think of teaching as concerned with qualifications, degrees, "O" and "A"levels and so on and purely from this point of view. Anyone in the teaching profession soon realises that it is ultimately a question of human relations—the relations between the student and the teacher. I feel that exactly the same thing can be said of industrial training boards. Ultimately, it is a question not of getting more productivity—of relations between trade unions, management and so on—but of people. One of the great problems of industry is the growing impersonalisation involved in technological development. If we remember this, the Bill will become the success it should be.

9.0 p.m.

Mr. R. E. Prentice: We have today had a good and constructive debate on a matter of great importance. My hon. Friends have made some first-class, constructive and forward-looking speeches and even from the benches opposite we have been glad to note that some hon. Members are beginning to say what we have been saying for years.
The Bill has been welcomed on both sides of the House, but a welcome which my hon. Friends and I want to qualify in two ways: first, our welcome does not exonerate the Government for their failure to tackle the problem of training over the past twelve years; and, secondly, we do not have much confidence in their ability to carry through the opportunities contained in the Measure because we must regard it, as the country will regard it, objectively; as being part of the pre-election nourish of the Government. The public are bound to say that if all these serious steps are needed, why has nothing been done about them in the last twelve years, particularly why
has nothing been done following the widespread debate on training that has taken place since the publication of the Carr Report in 1958.
We reject immediately any excuse on the part of the Government that they could not do these things earlier because they did not have the unanimous support of both sides of industry. For some time the Government have been lagging behind the more progressive views of many trade union leaders and employers. It is the job of Government to give a lead to opinion in these matters; to be ahead of progressive opinion and not to lag behind until the demand becomes virtually unanimous, as it has become recently.
We must see the Bill and the proposals it makes against the background of the current situation. I remind the House of the Answers the Minister gave me on Monday of this week to three Written Questions which I submitted about the present position. The first of these was a Question in which I asked him about the type of employment which school-leavers had been entering in the first ten months of this year; that is, up to the end of October. I will not quote the entire column of figures I was given but merely say that I was told that from 1st January until the end of October this year 33.6 per cent, of boys entered apprenticeships.
This figure compares with 36.2 per cent, in 1962 and 37.9 per cent, in 1961. In other words, while the debate has been going on since the White Paper was published and since talks have been going on with both sides of industry about it, the proportion of boys entering apprenticeships has gone down. The figures for girls show that their proportion has also gone down.
The second Question I asked on Monday was about the number of people being retrained in Government training centres. Hon. Members on both sides have rightly talked about retraining as being a part of this subject. I was told that on 11th November last the number of people in Government training centres totalled 2,317. Half of those were people in two special schemes, 857 disabled people and 331 able-bodied ex-Regular soldiers being rehabilitated for civilian life, and only 1,129 people in other categories. That is the scale of

the training in progress in an industrial nation of 50 million people. It shows that we have only about 2,000 trainees in all categories.

Mr. Godber: I am sure that the hon. Member is aware of the big expansion programme that is going on in the retraining sphere and that the picture will be substantially improved.

Mr. Prentice: We all share those hopes, but I think that the Minister will agree that all that is being proposed is the provision of 18 new centres. That is a considerable number compared with what we have now, but even when we have those we shall still fall very far short of what the situation demands, as illustrated by the right hon. Gentleman's own speech this afternoon as well as by other speeches on both sides of the House.
The third of the Questions to which I want to refer was one in which I asked how many training development officers are at the moment being deployed throughout the country by the Industrial Training Council, which gets a Government grant for the purpose. Now, in November, 1963, despite all the urgency of the problem, in a nation of our size, we have 11 training development officers doing this job—one for the whole of Scotland, measured against Scotland's needs in this sphere.
We are, therefore, justified in saying to the Government that we welcome this Bill, but that it does not in any way provide an excuse for the years of failure that have gone before; and that those years of failure do not inspire confidence in our minds or in the minds of people in industry in the Government's ability to carry this task through.
This Bill is only an enabling Measure. It will not itself provide an extra trainee in industry. It will not even provide a single industrial training board. It will give the Minister power to appoint industrial training boards, and, of course, we welcome the fact that, at last, the Minister will have those powers. For many years we have been asking that the Government should take such powers but, having said that, one must add that everything depends on the use made of the Bill and on the energy with which the Government, or a future Government, approach the problem; on the type of people appointed to the Central Training


Council and to the industrial boards, on the use made of the financial levy and the levels at which that levy is applied. There are all sorts of questions like that which cannot be answered by just looking at the Bill itself.
We do not complain necessarily about that—because of the nature of the problem, the Bill cannot contain a complete essay on Government training policy. It is bound to be an enabling Measure and it is bound to deal with machinery, and although, in Committee, we may have to put down Amendments on detailed points, I think that, by and large; my hon. Friends and I will accept the Bill as being the right kind of Bill.
Nevertheless, that being so, we have to look very closely, both in this debate and in Committee, at the kind of use that will be made of these new powers. I suggest that we should see the problem, and see this debate this evening, as the sequel to yesterday's debate on education and science. What the country has to do is to grasp the implications of the scientific revolution in which we live, and, particularly, to grasp the implications for the whole of our population at work. We do not achieve a break-through in science and technology simply by training more scientists and injecting them into industry—although that is a vital part of the programme.
I was very impressed by the maiden speech made yesterday by my hon. Friend the Member for Luton (Mr. Howie), in which he reminded the House that if we are to talk of a breakthrough in science we must go on to talk about the need to train more engineers, because scientific work has to be applied, and that is a job for engineers. I suggest that it follows that we also have to think in terms of more technicians, more craftsmen, more trained operatives of all kinds, no less than of raising the level of skill of our whole working population. Even the term "industrial training" is too narrow. I would rather have had the Bill called an "Occupational Training Bill", so as to make it clear that we are talking of jobs of all kinds in the community.
I put it to the House that our industrial history of the last 200 years

has been a story of the upgrading of the labour force. If we look at our pre-industrial society in the past, or the pre-industrial societies now in other parts of the world, we find the emphasis to be on unskilled manual labour. In Britain, during the eighteenth century, there was a very narrow layer of aristocrats in industry—the skilled workers. The story of our industry since then has been one in which the number of skilled people has been increasing, the number of professional people has been increasing, and there has gradually been a larger and larger demand on the skills of the population. The pace at which this is happening and will happen during the rest of this century is faster than any of us have yet faced. This is the challenge that faces a future Government in this matter of training.
I should like to remind the House of some of the warnings which have become clear to us in recentdevelopments in the United States where the technological revolution has gone a little further than it has gone here. On the one hand, the United States has a heavy and chronic unemployment which is being called structural or technological unemployment and is particularly evident among young people. Eighteen per cent, of the teenagers of the United States are unemployed. This is appalling. Electricians in New York City recently negotiated a 25-hour basic week to protect their employment.
This is one side of the situation. On the other side we see in the United States technicians, managers and professional men appallingly over-worked for long hours at great strain, until it seems that the only question left is whether they have a thrombosis in their 40s or in their 50s. This is an example of society making a bigger and bigger demand for higher skills at a time when it creates unemployment for others because training programmes have not measured up to the scale of change in the United States in recent years.
Yet a comparison is often made between their education and training system and ours to show that in many ways ours is deficient compared with theirs. We shall face that kind of problem unless we carry through a training revolution on a much bigger


scale than the Government have shown themselves aware of in recent months.
The danger is that the Government, in their new-found zeal for reform, will be merely trying to catch up with the position which we should have reached ten yean; ago. Many of the speeches made by hon. Members opposite have been concentrated on the reform of apprenticeship. Hon. Members have spoken about the length of training and the age of entry into apprenticeship and have made comparisons between the British system and systems in European countries. There is a great deal to be said on that subject. I and my hon. Friends have contributed to discussions in the past and have made speeches in favour of the reform of apprenticeship.
I hope, however, that hon. Members opposite will not concentrate on this attack on the trade unions. There is, of course, evidence of a conservative attitude among some small sections of the trade union movement, but when one talks of the trade union movement one is talking of 9½ million people and it is easy for critics to generalise from bad instances here and there. The general failure, however, is the failure of employers and of the Government to take charge of the situation.
The reform of apprenticeship is only one aspect of this whole problem. We haveto evolve a training programme and apply it to people in all kinds of jobs, needing all kinds of skills. One thing which must be clear about this is that this Government or a future Government will require a powerful machine at the centre to make a plan of this kind. One of the weakest parts of the Minister's speech was when he spoke about the Central Training Council and did not tell us very much about it. He said virtually nothing about the kind of machine which he will have in the Ministry to implement all this from the centre.
Some people have said, and the T.U.C. has taken the view, that we require a central training authority which will be outside the Ministry. We have had arguments about this and on whether it should be an authority with executive powers or an authority of the kind which the Minister has provided for in the Bill. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) that on

the whole the Minister's proposals are probably right, but they are right only if there is at the centre within the Ministry a sufficiently powerful machine.
After all, the Bill proposes to give the Minister considerable powers if he is prepared to use them. Under Clause 7 he has power to dismiss an industrial training board and appoint others to take its place. If he is really going to check up on what the industrial training boards throughout the country are doing, measure their success and decide whether what they are doing is good enough, he will need in his Department a large enough and sufficiently informed team of people to do this job.
We need a thrust at the centre. I see the Central Training Council as being a training equivalent to N.E.D.C., doing a manpower planning job for the whole of industry, dovetailed in with a plan for economic expansion. I believe there has got to be the staff at the centre to do the detailed work, the public relations work and the statistical work which will give the service that is needed here.
There are three points in particular, all of which have emerged in thecourse of the debate, and which I would like to underline in relation to this task. The first is that this central machinery must be carrying out a job of manpower budgeting. The Minister, at Question Time on Monday, referred with some pride to his 14-manresearch team, which he calls the manpower research unit, in the Ministry. I suppose that he can be proud of the fact that he has got 14 people doing this work. Back in the summer there were only two people doing it, and a year ago there were no people at all. So this is an improvement. But surely it has got to improve a great deal more in order to do the statistical study and forward planning that is needed.
We do not know how many apprentices there are in the country at present. We have no figures. The Carr Committee in 1958 drew attention to the fact that there were no figures on this point. There are still no figures about it. Is it not time that there was carried through a lot of this staff work in order to begin creating a real plan for having trained people to meet the economic expansion that lies ahead?
The second feature that I want to emphasise is that all our training plans have got to be plans for flexible training. We must get away from the idea—hon. Members on both sides of the House have made the point—of training a boy or girl for one narrow skill which may become redundant ten, twenty or thirty years' hence. Even if we have our manpower planning unit in a time of rapid technological change it will not get all the answers right. It will not make all the right guesses about the future. We must see that people get the kind of training which will make them adaptable and enable them to do various jobs in their own industry and even in another industry. I thought the best part of the Government's White Paper on training of last December—which otherwise I thought was a feeble White Paper—was that which dealt with the need to have a systematic period—say a year or so—of classroom training as part of a normal apprenticeship or training period.
Another point which has been made by a number of my hon. Friends is one which I should like to develop a little further. This is the need to think in terms of training for everybody, and not just for a minority of those entering industry. We in the Labour Party seek a society in which we see the breakdown of class barriers. One class barrier that we want to see broken down is the barrier between the so-called skilled worker who has served his time and the rest who have not served their time. I say that in no sense derogatory to the skilled worker, but in a desire to uplift the status and dignity of the other workers and in recognition of the fact that a rigid division between one kind of worker and another is no longer realistic.
Industry now is using a whole spectrum of skills. What nonsense it is to talk of a farm labourer as though the man who does all the technical jobs on the farm is unskilled. There is a whole spectrum of skills, and this concept will grow. Therefore, we have to think in terms of the training of every entrant into industry, and of giving to all entrants the type of training which is appropriate to the jobs they are to do, and giving them enough general training in industry to enable them to turn from one job to another.
In recent years some industries, some firms in particular, have developed some imaginative schemes for non-apprentices. I have recently read in my own union journal, the Record, the publication of the Transport and General Workers'Union, an account of a scheme which that union and other unions have negotiated in the heavy chemicals industry, by which it has been agreed that every entrant into the industry will get an induction training course; and there will be courses of varying periods, and a number of them will have a two-year course and a number of others will have a five-year training period, according to the type of job they are doing and according to the kind of aptitudes which they have.
In the steel industry a number of firms have got away from the old system by which an entrant learnt a job in the gang in which he was working. I had the privilege, during the Recess, to see the Workington Iron and Steel Company, part of the United Steel group, in which every entrant into their group of companies in that part of England gets training, whether he is working on the shop floor, or in the office, or any other kind of job.
This is the sort of thing which, at its best, is very good, but it is still only happening for a minority of entrants into industry. Only a minority of boys who do not enter a formal apprenticeship, get this kind of opportunity, and certainly only a very small minority of girls get this kind of opportunity; and particularly in the field of the clerical workers, to whom my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, North-East (Mr. Bradley) referred, a very, very small number of those going into office work get any kind of organised training of this kind.
These are big deserts, as it were, in the training world, and these are the fields of endeavour to be tackled by the industrial training boards with the object of seeing that there is training for all entrants into industry, and retraining for older men where appropriate.
If we are thinking in terms of expanding training for those who hitherto have been, as it were, "below"—I say it in quotation marks, if that is possible in a speech—the apprenticeship level, we have equally to deal imaginatively with the training of those "above"—I say


it in quotation marks—the apprenticeship level, a ad we have to ask ourselves whether within industry enough people are being trained for the higher levels of skill, whether enough technicians are being trained, enough people being trained on the technical side and the commercial side so as to qualify for junior management positions.
Here again, the best of what is done in British industry is very, very good, the type of sandwich courses in which boys, and occasionally girls, work for periods in industry, andalso go to technical colleges and then back again, with some courses leading up to graduate apprenticeships. These courses are excellent, but they are also entirely confined to large firms, and most small and medium sized firms do not do this or cannot give this type of opportunity, and the number of people who are coming out of these courses is not sufficient for the kind of society which we have got to develop in the future.
Here, I hope that emphasis will be laid on Clause 2(2) of the Bill which refers to the powers of industrial training boards to apprentice people to a board instead of apprenticing them to a firm. This is the sort of concept which we would like to see.
We need to get this on a wider basis so that we can estimate the numbers required and make an ambitious plan to train up people and for junior management training. I thought the Minister was a bit lukewarm this afternoon in his reference to management training. Over a whole lot of British industry, there is practically no management training. Too much of our industry is like an army which trains the private soldiers and some of the N.C.O.s but does not train the officers at all.
To take the military analogy a little further, I think that industry could learn from the Armed Forces in this respect. In the Army, a captain or a junior major, if he is selected to go to the Staff College, is glad to go. It is an important step in his career. If he passes out, he can put after his name the magic letters P.S.C., passed Staff College, and this marks him out as someone who will probably get higher promotion later. Senior officers are equally glad to go to the Imperial College of Defence.
In great sections of British industry, on the other hand, if a man at equivalent level in middle management were to ask to be sent away on a course, it would be regarded as a sign of weakness. We must have a different attitude of mind in all this. There are too many people in management who think that they learn everything by experience, as though experience were the only thing they needed, who are complacent about their own level of training. They are not likely to do a proper job in training the people under their control unless they start by thinking in terms of training themselves. A revolution in management training is badly needed in this country.
Now, the levy. It seems to me that this must be regarded as a very important part of the whole scheme. It is easy to talk as though everyone were interested in training. One of the welcome developments of the past year or two has been the more serious discussion about training and the fact that more people are really interested in doing something about it; but there are still too many firms which drag their feet, which will not play their part, and which rely on poaching skilled workers trained by someone else.
Of course, small firms have an excuse, sometimes a legitimate excuse, that they are not able to afford their own training schemes. I accept that, although I should have liked to have seen more progress, as I am sure we all would, in group training schemes during recent years. The industrial training boards will have the task of giving them new opportunities and promoting group training schemes, helping to provide, through the colleges and groups of firms, I hope, the development of group training schemes. However, having done that, they must still have a weapon to use against the firms which are not playing their part.
Therefore, I repeat what has been said by many hon. Members—it must be repeated and emphasised many times—that we hope that the levy will be big enough and strong enough really to bite and that it will give real encouragement to the firms which play their part and be a real penalty to those which do not.
I welcome the emphasis on the educational aspects of the problem. I hope


that we shall in Committee talk about day release and block release and see whether we can write into the Bill some provisions about that. I know that the matter is under consideration by a committee responsible to the right hon. Gentleman, but it has been under consideration for too long. I wonder whether he can tell us anything more about it this evening. We shall certainly wish to hear more in Committee.
We shall wish to examine the educational representation on the boards and on the Central Training Council. Many people are worried about the numbers in this connection. The teachers in technical institutions have sent a memorandum to some of us questioning whether six education members on the Central Training Council will be good enough. We shall certainly have to consider this and emphasise the need for the educational representation to be big enough to have a real effect on what we have in mind.
It seems to me that the principle is this. At present, for far too many young people there is a sharp break between being at school and being at work. School finishes on one day and then work begins. Education is something which has been left behind. If we can regard training as being a transition from education to work, then not only will it be something which does good in itself but it may help people to the realisation that education is something which continues throughout life, not something which is left behind at the end of school.
I should like to have dealt with many other things, but one is limited in time. This is such a fascinating subject that all of us would like to talk for hours about it. The spirit which has come across from this side of the House during the debate has, I think, been this. We regard this problem as presenting a twofold challenge. On the one hand, we are challenged to have manpower and training policies which will match the technological revolution of our time, to see that we are able to expand the economy and increase prosperity and that we have training policies that will play a great part in that objective.
Secondly, we are concerned with the status and dignity of every man and woman at work. The improvement of

training can be seen as something which gives people greater skill, greater self-confidence and greater fulfilment for working life. Fortunately, the two objectives do not conflict but march together. This Bill can be a great help towards the fulfilment of both, if, and only if, it is carried out energetically and its passage is followed by the election of a Government which will have the courage and will to carry through the training revolution that is essential.

9.30 p.m.

The Minister of Education (Sir Edward Boyle): It is no coincidence that we should be discussing this Bill first among all the legislative Measures of the present Session. It is an extremely important Measure. It marks a major new development in Government policy.
I acknowledge the wide welcome it has received on both sides of the House and I entirely agreed with what the hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice) said about the importance not merely of passing the Bill but of ensuring that it is followed up. Indeed, I think that I agreed with everything he said except when he used the words "a Government" at the end of his speech. We might not all agree on how the indefinite article should be filled in.
I have no desire to enter into past controversy with the two hon. Members who spoke from the Opposition Front Bench about the back history of this subject. I greatly welcome what the hon. Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) said about the Bill being one of those measures which translate modernisation into reality, which, I think, was a happy phrase. I am sure that we on this side would all like to thank him for his very graceful references to Lord Blakenham.
It is worth remembering just how definitely the Carr Report spoke on this matter. In paragraph 18 it was said categorically:
The efforts of the Government should be directed to the expansion and improvement of the facilities for technical education, while the responsibility for the industrial training of apprentices should rest firmly with industry.
I agree that that was a Committee whose membership included three very prominent members of the General Council of the T.U.C. On the other hand, as I recognise, there were doubts


about the purity of that doctrine almost from the time the Report appeared.
I recall a debate in 1959, in which I took part, in which the Chairman of the Committee himself seemed to be developing some doubts about the purity of the doctrine. There was a further debate in 1960. All I can say is that it is one thing to feel that a change of policy is in the air but another actually to secure agreement on new proposals. What I welcome is that the proposals in the Bill have met a very favourable response from both sides of industry and from the education service as a whole. That is something with which the House can well feel very pleased.
The hon. Member for Southwark said two things which interested me. He talked of the need for greater intervention by the State in industrial matters and said that the Government alone could give a lead. He then said, very fairly, that the man in Whitehall does not always know best. I agree with both of those statements.
I believe that if we are to plan for an expanding economy and not have a siege economy it cannot be right for Whitehall to attempt to plan in detail all production targets for all industries, but on the other hand I have no doubt that the Government can do a great deal to foster growth industries and growth generally through encouraging skilled manpower. As I see it, the approach of the Bill is wholly in line with the approach of my right hon. Friends, already shown in ideas like the setting up of the N.E.D.C.
This must be the first occasion in the history of the House when we have had two debates on successive days concerned directly or indirectly with education, and I agree with the hon. Member for East Ham, North when he looks on this debate as being, to some extent, a sequel to yesterday's. Bearing in mind that I have sat through two full days of debate on education, that there has also been a debate on education in another place, and that my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury quoted from the New Testament, I am rather tempted to quote other words spoken twenty-seven years ago:
At last I am able to speak a few words of my own on this subject.

But the fact that we have spent two successive days on education shows very clearly the importance which the whole House attaches to educational advance.
There are two reasons for this, as the hon. Member for East Ham, North has said, both of them highly relevant to the Bill. On the one hand, we all recognise the importance of education to Britain's economic future and the need to mobilise the talents of all our young people if we are to achieve an adequate rate of economic growth to earn our living in an increasingly competitive world. I say "adequate rate of economic growth" because I do not regard economic growth as in any way a luxury. As I see it, it is something essential if we are to pay our way and earn our living in world conditions which will become increasingly difficult.
Of course, it is not only the higher technological education which is important in this context. If I have a criticism of some speeches which have been made from both sides of the House on the subject of the Robbins Report it has been that too often hon. Members speak of the connection of growth with higher technological education, but do not always go on to say that it is no use having the finest scientists and technologists in the world unless we also have a sufficient supply of technicians and craftsmen to back up their work and exploit their achievements. We need a sufficiency of trained manpower right the way down the line, and this is the purpose of the Bill.
In this context, too, as in so many others, there are the social arguments for educational advance, of which the hon. Member for East Ham, North spoke and on which my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Chiswick (Mr. Dudley Smith) made such an admirable speech. Just as we believe that all boys and girls should, as far as possible, have the opportunity of a school education which does full justice to their potential abilities, so we also believe that better provision for industrial training must be right in itself. It is all the more important that we should be making this provision and thinking about this subject after a period of ten years in which there has been an unprecedented rise in secondary school standards.
I do not want again to go over the ground which was covered in yesterday debate, but it is worth reflecting on just how rapidly secondary education hi been developing in this country during the past ten years. During the period 1953–63, expenditure on the secondary schools has approximately trebled at time when secondary school numbers have risen by about 60 per cent. After making full allowance for differences cost, this has meant a rise in real tern in expenditure per pupil of about; per cent, over 10 years.
This large improvement element which we have deliberately planned to continue for the future—during the next five years the secondary school population will remain stationary but the amount in real terms spent per pupil will go on rising—has already been reflected in all sorts of ways: much larger numbers in the sixth forms, a far larger percentage staying on voluntarily beyond the official school leaving age, an steadily improving G.C.E. results, both at O level and A level, and so on.
I mention these facts because there is a tendency to think too much in terms only of the development of the secondary schools in relation to Robbins. When we are dealing with technician; one has surely to take account of sue figures as O level passes in mathematic something crucially important, having risen 25 per cent, during the course c this Parliament. There has been an improvement in secondary school standards all along the line. I was interested in what the hon. Member for Leeds South Mr. Merlyn Rees) said on the subject of technical education and secondary schools. What I can say is that when we come to look at the school building programmes for the next two yearsand part of the third year, which I have announced, it will certainly be my idea to take a special look at the needs of science teaching in school; not least in girls' schools where, frankly it has often been too much neglected in the past. It is only right that w should match this development of secondary schools with a corresponding development not only of full-time higher education but also of further education generally, and of provision for industrial training.
I want to take this opportunity of e saying something about recent developments in further education which my it predecessor—now Lord Eccles—did so much to foster. The momentum initiated by the 1956 White Paper has been fully kept up. Since 1956 the numbers of part-time day students in England and a Wales have increased by about 50 per cent, from 422,000 to 602,000; the numbers of full-time and sandwich students have risen from 67,000 to 157,000, and the numbers of students taking advanced full-time and sandwich courses have risen from 13,000 to 38,000.
Not least—because this must be the foundation of further advance—the number of teachers in further education has increased from 12,500 in 1956 to over 24,500. I believe that Sir Willis Jackson's Report on the supply of technical teachers, was one of the most valuable we have ever received in the Ministry.

Mr. George Lawson: Will the right hon. Gentleman be good enough to give us the corresponding figures for Scotland?

Sir E. Boyle: I must apologise for the fact that I have not got them, but I have a note on my next page to mention Scotland. I was going to say a word about building. For technical college building, a £70 million, five-year building programme was initiated in 1956 and then a three-year building programme of £45 million. Since then I have announced a programme of £16 million for 1964–65 and, much more recently, a much larger programme of £24 million worth of starts for 1965–66—and there will be a rise in the Scottish programme also, although I have not the precise t figures with me tonight. I will pass on the hon. Member's request to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. We hear a great deal about school building, and I regard the technical college building programme, and the further education programme—which includes technical colleges, art and agriculture—as something of great importance.
Considering all the education developments which have taken place in recent years, or which—as under the terms of the Bill now before us—are planned for the future, it seems clear that we can reasonably anticipate a growing versatility and adaptability of our labour


force. I wholly agree with what the hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice) and other hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) have said about adaptability. This matter was recognised in the 1962 White Paper on Industrial Training, and has been further italicised in the Newsom Report. Very early on, in paragraph 13, the Report says that
This trend in industrial employment is matched by a second, the expansion in employment in service occupations at a level that makes new demands on their employees. The retail trade is increasingly looking for a better educated recruit who will be neither an errand boy nor possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of the product he sells, but be more capable of understanding and reacting effectively to the human situation in which he finds himself.
That is a very true paragraph. This adaptability must be of great importance at a time when new industries, new production processes and new patterns of industrial organisation are being developed all the time.
Whatever may have been the sources of Britain's greatness in the past, as a nation we shall be able to afford the sort of society we all want to see only if we set a high value on standards of professional competence at every level. I have no doubt that the Bill before us tonight will prove of great importance for the economic future of the nation, and that it also constitutes a major educational advance. The main beneficiaries will be the boys and girls in the Crowther group—if I may so refer to them—the 15–18s who go straight into employment when they leave school and who constitute a large majority of young people within these ages. They are also the boys and girls—the future technicians, craftsmen and operatives—who were the subject of the 1961 White Paper on Better Opportunities in Technical Education. I intervened when the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) was speaking and I apologise if, in a way, I unnecessarily interrupted his speech. But I wished to point out that I thought there was a tendency to overlook the effects of that White Paper. It did implement a number of recommendations in the Crowther Report and it has achieved a good deal. For instance, provision has been made for boys and girls to enter technical courses immediately on leaving school at fifteen instead of spending a

year in an evening institute before starting at a technical college.

Mr. Boyden: Although there has been all this activity, how does the Minister account for the fact that while the percentage of the higher education National Certificate failures in 1962 was slightly improved, the actual number of failures was worse than in 1959? They were 5,640 compared with 4,908. If we take the Ordinary National Certificate totals, the figure in 1962 of 18,800 is more than 1959. I know that there has been a slight percentage improvement, but it seems as if there still remains a lot to be done.

Sir E. Boyle: I was coming to that very point. Technician courses of a diagnostic type designed specially to reduce wastage have been launched on the engineering side of applied science and in a number of other subjects. The hon. Gentleman quoted from the year after the White Paper. But I think that we have to see how this works out in a later year than 1962. This has been one of the implementations of the White Paper. Then, of course, more time has been provided for study. This has been introduced for day release students and many craft courses will enable education to be provided. I do not think that we can draw a hard and fast line between educating and training. There is a good deal of overlapping between the two, and to be fully proficient, all technicians and craftsmen require both types of experience.
I think that it is because the educational and social value of the Government's proposals have been recognised that they have received a warm welcome throughout the education service. The industrial training scheme has been conceived from the start as a partnership between industry and the education service and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I, and our Departments, have co-operated fully at every stage in the preparation of this scheme and of the Bill. I know that many people are anxious lest too much emphasis is placed on training in the narrow sense. But we have deliberately built a number of provisions into the Bill which should fully safeguard the educational needs.
These provisions take two forms. First, in Clause 2 there is a provision under


which training boards will be under a statutory obligation to make recommendations with regard to the further education to be pursued in association with the training that they recommend. Secondly, the Bill provides for the participation of educationists as members both of every board and of the Central Training Council. In each case they will be appointed by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Labour after consultation with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland and myself. They will be appointed in their personal capacities and not as delegates, because they have the experience and the other, qualities necessary to make an effective contribution to the work of the boards.
Our present intention is that the members of every board should, in practice, include at least one teacher and someone from a local education authority.In addition, the Secretary of State and I will be empowered to appoint assessors from our Departments to every board and the intention is that there shall be educational representation on all appropriate committees whether functional, regional or local. Educationists will also play an important part on the Central Training Council. Six of the members will be appointed after consultation with the Secretary of State and myself. I know that some people feel that it should have been the Minister of Education rather than the Minister of Labour who was responsible for this scheme. This point has been put to me and expressed in another place. The provisions mean that the Ministry of Education will have to play a larger part in this matter than ever before. I think that my presence here winding up this debate is evidence of this.
We have to remember that the Bill inevitably involves matters closely bound up with the responsibilities of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Labour. I am quite sure that the educationalneeds can be fully secured through the machinery for which it provides. As a result of the Bill we shall be able to look forward to a substantial and rapidly growing expansion in the number of boys and girls who are given day, block or sandwich release to attend courses of further education.
The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland asked about day release. When I came to my present Ministry last July I received almost at once a report saying that representatives from both sides of industry and teachers and local education authorities were all against the prescriptive legislative right to day release. Nonetheless I appointed a Committee under Mr. Henniker Heaton to see how day release could be promoted and I expect to receive its Report next year. I think I shall receive it before this Bill has passed through the House.

Mr. J. Robertson: Can the Minister tell us whether the Secretary of State for Scotland has received a Report of the deliberations of such a Committee in relation to Scotland? Am I wrong in thinking that it has recommended compulsory day release?

Sir E. Boyle: So far as I know, this was a general review in the education service and in industry. I shall certainly be discussing with the Secretary of State the results of the Report I receive from the Henniker Heaton Committee.
In the first instance, we shall naturally think mainly about craft and technician apprentices. I hope the work of the boards will lead to substantial improvements in both the quantity and the quality of the provision for education and training of technicians. I am not sure that we yet give the technician proper status in our scheme of things. Technicians cover a very wide range of policy. In the education service one might say that they go right through the top of the C.S.E. range, as it will be, through the whole of G.C.E. and that all those men and women can be technicians. We have done a great deal through the reorganisation of the 1961 White Paper, but nonetheless, there is still a widespread failure in industry to recognise the importance of the technician and the need to give him education and training specially designed to meet his needs.
Even today, although there are exceptions such as the larger electrical engineering companies, few firms positively recruit people for training and education as technicians. Although a few firms have promoted craft apprentices who have done well academically at a technical college, a great many firms


have not got to the stage of distinguishing technicians from craftsmen on the one hand and technologists on the other, and therefore needing special education and training. Boys who show promise of becoming technicians in their college work are not, therefore, given the industrial training which they need to fit them for technician jobs.
As the industrial training White Paper foreshadowed, I would expect the Bill to result in a substantial increase in the integrated courses of education and training for first year apprentices which have developed in recent years. Over 100 such courses are being provided by about 80 local education authorities in England and Wales, and they are attended by 3,000 apprentices, mainly from the engineering and construction industries. There is no doubt about their value. I think there will be a stimulus to their development as a result of the powers in the Bill under which it will be possible for the boards to pay grants to the firms in respect of the cost of sending their apprentices to courses at technical colleges involving industrial training.
I have, dealt mainly with the implications of the Bill for craft and technician apprentices because we all feel that these will be the groups most likely to be affected in the early stages. But the responsibilities of the boards, I must emphasise, will extend to all forms of training, and the establishment of the boards, with their strong educational representation, should contribute greatly to that co-operation between industry and further education at all levels which has been such a valuable feature of our whole educational system.
I agree with what the hon. Member for Edmonton said about this. The provisions of the 1944 Act in relation to further education are relatively imprecise, and it was the work of industry in co-operating with further education which did a great deal to hasten the great progress which we have made since 1956. For example, there was the very rapid development of sandwich courses, mainly in the last ten years. We shall need an ever-increasing number of practical training places in industry to cope with the growing number of sandwich course students—and I use "industry" to include commerce, because, as the House knows, successful

experiments are already being conducted with advanced sandwich courses in business studies. I am sure that there will be developments there, too.
I agree with the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu), who made such a constructive speech, that the boards could be a great help in the matter of encouraging more firms to offer training places for both "works-based" and "college-based" students.
Before I come to my last sentence or two, I should like to answer some questions which were raised. On the Central Training Council, my right hon. Friend entirely agrees that this should not become just another advisory body. On the other hand, there is the point of Parliamentary responsibility for the money in the Bill and also the point that the Minister must himself be able to provide impetus. The hon. Member for Edmonton mentioned statistics. There is the manpower research unit which was set up this year at the Ministry of Labour and which I believe will be of real importance. In reply to the hon. Member for Edmonton, there will certainly have to be a new inspectorate as a result of the measures which are being provided in the Bill.
I should like to say a word on the subject of management education and studies, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for East Ham, North. In the colleges of technology and commerce there have been important developments from the enthusiasm for courses for the new diploma in management studies. The number of these courses has increased from 53 to 90 and the number of enrolments has risen from 1,153 to very nearly 3,000. Hon. Members attached importance to the training of supervisors and foremen. A Report last year published by my right hon. Friend noted that there were 140 colleges in Great Britain running more than 300 courses catering for more than 9,000 students, and the Report urged that the provision of these courses should be still further increased. I have commended this Report to local education authorities and colleges in the confidence that they will do all that they can, in consultation with industry, to consider making further provision, because this is a matter of very considerable importance.
I commend the Bill to the House. I am sorry that I have had to cover rather a lot of ground in a short time. The Bill will make a major contribution to industrial efficiency and a most important contribution to educational and social progress. On both economic and social grounds it is essential that the training and education which we give to young people entering industry today shall be such as to prepare them adequately for all the demands which will be made upon their skill and adaptability under modern industrial conditions. This can be achieved only by a close partnership between industry and education at every level, and that will be made possible by the Bill. It is with every confidence that I ask the House to agree to its Second Reading.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second Time.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee, pursuant to Standing Order No. 40 (Committal of Bills).

Orders of the Day — INDUSTRIAL TRAINING [MONEY]

[Queen's Recommendation signified]

Considered in Committee under Standing Order No. 88 (Money Committees).

[Sir WILLIAM ANSTRUTHER-GRAY in the Chair]

Resolved,

That, for the purposes of any Act of this Session to make further provision for industrial and commercial training, it is expedient to authorise the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament of—
(a) grants or loans, not in the aggregate exceeding £50 million or such greater amount as may from time to time be by order determined, to bodies exercising functions under that Act in connection with industrial or commercial training;
(b) any expenses incurred by any person in acting in place of the members of such a body in pursuance of default powers exercisable under that Act;
(c) allowances to members of a Central Training Council established under that Act;
(d) fees and allowances to members of tribunals established under that Act, and allowances to persons giving evidence before such tribunals;

(e) any administrative expenses incurred by any Minister under that Act;
(f) any increase attributable to that Act in the sums so payable by way of Rate-deficiency Grant or Exchequer Equalisation Grant under the enactments relating to local government in England and Wales or in Scotland; and
(g) any increase in the sums so payable under those enactments in respect of general grants which may arise from any increase attributable to that Act in the expenditure relevant to the fixing of the aggregate amounts of those grants.—[Mr. Green.]

Resolution to be reported.

Report to be received Tomorrow.

Orders of the Day — BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Ordered,

That the Proceedings on the Nigeria Republic Bill may be entered upon and proceeded with at this day's Sitting at any hour, though opposed.—[Mr. Selwyn Lloyd.]

Orders of the Day — NIGERIA REPUBLIC BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

10.1 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and for the Colonies (Mr. John Tilney): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
The object of the Bill is well explained in the Long Title It is to be retrospective to 1st October of this year. This was explained by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and for the Colonies in the reply which he made on 1st August to my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge (Mr. Hornby), who, I believe, both sides of the House are delighted to see now on the Treasury Bench and who will be replying to the debate.
In August it was not known what the precise form of the republican Constitution would be. During the period since Nigeria has been a republic, and, therefore, ceased to be one of Her Majesty's Dominions, certain Acts which would have applied to Nigeria as a Dominion have ceased to apply. Hence the need for the Bill to be retrospective. It is a procedure which has been to some extent copied from the Ireland Act, 1949.
As regards the bulk of our law, the effects of our Acts ceasing to apply to Nigeria have, I believe, caused administrative delay only. I instance certain actions which might have had to be taken, say under the Maintenance Orders Act, 1920, which may have been delayed till the Bill becomes law. It is most likely, in my opinion, that the rights of any individual have not been materially affected during the period since 1st October. No doubt those who are likely to be hurt in any way would have taken note of what my right hon. Friend said on 1st August.
I believe that the House would like me to recall the history of the change from dominion to republican status. In December, 1961, the Prime Minister of Nigeria mentioned the likelihood of this happening, but it was only on 29th April of this year that a formal announcement was made to the Nigerian Parliament that Nigeria would become a Republic within the Commonwealth on 1st October, 1963, the third anniversary of the independence of Nigeria.
The regional Premiershad met at the end of June of this year and there was an all-party conference towards the end of July. Both discussed the main lines of the Constitution. The proposals were debated and endorsed in the Federal and Regional Legislatures during the first part of August. On 13th September the Constitution of Federation Bill appeared, which was passed by the 19th of that month by both Houses of the Federal Legislature. I do not believe that the House would wish me to go in detail into the changes of the constitutional powers. These are not great The President, as in India, is a constitutional and not an executive one.
I am lucky to have many Nigerian friends, as I know are many hon. Members on both sides of the House. I have been equally lucky to have been in Nigeria on many historic occasions. The Sardauna of Sokoto, the Premier of the great Northern Region, asked me to be present at the self-government celebrations of 1959, and to witness in Kaduna the splendid and massive Durbar. In 1960, Dr. Azikiwe, the new President, asked me as his guest to be present at the celebrations in Lagos when he was sworn in as Governor-General.
I so well remember travelling back in the same aeroplane with some of his

co-guests—Mr. Tom Mboya, Mr. Joshua Nkomo, and Dr. Ralph Bundle—and how we all discussed, and were unanimous in saying how much we had enjoyed, the hospitality and the charm of the Nigerian people. I only wish that I had been present on 1st October of this year to hear the new President say this:
Our decision to remain in the Commonwealth of Nations, after our transformation into a federal republic, is based on our deep appreciation of the traditions, ideals, values, and practices which make the Commonwealth a bastion of democracy in a world where the tendency is to concentrate powers in the hands of the few and to deny the masses fundamental rights.
I also like to think of the new President not only as an athlete and as a sportsman, an enthusiast for cricket, himself running very fast indeed, elated at the successes of Hogan Bassey, in Paris, or more recently of Dick Tiger, but as one with broad knowledge and vision, spending much of his holiday not so very long ago in England, at the British Museum, reading up the history of Nigeria and of the time of the formation of that great country.
I like to think, too, that in that history British men of vision like Lord Lugard and others who brought within one great frontier people of so many different tongues, themselves played an important rôle. In the words of the Prime Minister of Nigeria upon independence, Nigeria has known us
first as masters, then as leaders, finally as partners—but always as friends.
Nigeria has now become the seventh republic in the Commonwealth. On 29th April, the Prime Minister said in the House of Representatives:
We do not intend to sever our relationship with the Commonwealth or to abandon our membership of that free association of sovereign States. It is our intention to continue as a full member of the Commonwealth and. in common with all other countries in this unique institution, to accept the Queen as the Head of the Commonwealth.
It may be for the convenience of the House if I briefly comment on the various Clauses of the Bill. Since I am no lawyer I hope that I will be forgiven for referring somewhat often to my notes. The Bill is a technical Measure to preserve the operation of our law as if Nigeria had not become a republic so that the expression "Her Majesty's dominions" in our law shall be read as


if they did, in effect, still include Nigeria. Indeed, it follows broadly the main provisions of Acts passed when India, Pakistan, Ghana, Cyprus and Tanganyika became republics.
Clause 1(1) provides that as regards the places mentioned in Clause 1(2) all existing laws shall not be affected as a result of Nigeria becoming a republic. Subsection (3) relates to pending appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. This is new in form and represents a departure from the precedents of Ghana and Tanganyika. The reason for this is that Nigeria herself has chosen to continue pending appeals as regards Nigerian law in a way that also is new. Under her new Constitution, Nigeria has abolished appeals to the Privy Council, but has provided that appeals, in all but constitutional and chieftancy cases which were pending on 1st October, 1963, should continue to be heard and disposed of by the Privy Council.
This, in effect, means that all pending appeals will be treated in Nigerian law as if they were still appealsto Her Majesty in Council under the old Constitution; the procedure to be followed and the method of giving effect to the Order in Council in which the Report of the Judicial Committee is embodied remain unaltered. Accordingly, in our law, jurisdiction need not be conferred on the Privy Council to hear pending appeals as a result of an arrangement as was done in the case of Ghana and Tanganyika but jurisdiction can be conferred direct as a result of the operation of Nigerian law. Accordingly, Clauses 1(1)and 1(3), when read in conjunction with the relevant provision of Nigerian law, provide that the Judicial Committee continues to have jurisdiction to hear and dispose of pending appeals, but no others. Clause 1(4) gives the whole of Clause 1 retrospective effect to 1st October this year.
Clause 2 gives power to make adaptations to any Act of Parliament by Order in Council, as appear necessary as a consequence of Nigeria becoming a republic and provides that such Orders or any other Orders varying or revoking previous Orders may be made retrospective to 1st October, 1963.
To the President, the Prime Minister and to their colleagues in all the

Nigerian Governments, I am sure that this House would wish to send their best wishes, above all to the Nigerian people. From Sokoto to Maiduguri or Yola, from Katsina to Ibadan, Benin, Port Harcourt or Calabar one finds wherever one is lucky enough to go—by aeroplane, train or road—a cheery, friendly, helpful, dignified people. In the recent discoveries of oil and gas, in their efforts to harness the untapped powers of the Niger, in their ancient industrial crafts, at places like Bida, Kano and many others, and agricultural production, may they prosper. And may, as well, moral fibre continue ever to be found in the Nigerian Republic.

10.15 p.m.

Mr. A. G. Bottomley: It gives me pleasure at the commencement of this debate to join the Under-Secretary of State in congratulating his hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge (Mr. Hornby) on joining the Government. We wish the hon. Gentleman well in the few months he will have a chance to sit on the Treasury Bench, but we hope soon to see him on this side of the Chamber.
We join with the Under-Secretary in welcoming this Bill. Like him, I am no lawyer, and I am very glad to note that he kept carefully to the guidance that had been given to him. I accept that this Bill has the effect of continuing the special treatment accorded in British legislation to members of the Commonwealth. It is necessary to do this because Nigeria now becomes a Republic, with its own President in the place of Her Majesty The Queen as Head of State.
I am sure that everyone in this country takes great pleasure in seeing Nigeria prosper and grow in strength. I have had only ashort visit there, but I count amongst many of my friends leaders in Nigeria and many others connected with other forms of social and business life there. The Nigerians are the most delightful people, and one can only recollect with great joy one's personal association with them. We all, indeed, wish them every success. There is little doubt that Nigeria will play an ever-increasing part in the destinies of Africa and, again, this is something that we should all welcome.
The fact that Nigeria has chosen a republican Constitution in no way affects the close relations which we have with her and with her peoples. The form of the Constitution is something for the Nigerian Government and people to determine, and this Bill comes before us only because certain consequential amendments are required to United Kingdom legislation.
There are now a number of republics in the Commonwealth and we should give some thought to the practice of Colonies. becoming independent, initially, under a monarchic Constitution, andconsider whether this is still desirable. In the context of modern events, it is worth considering whether it is wise that these newly-independent countries should have to accept as Head of State a Queen who is resident in London. We have to face the fact that it is not very attractive to national leaders in Africa, and we might consider the possibility of a republican Constitution being looked at from the beginning of independence, and not only when this stage is reached.
One of the effects of Nigeria becoming a republic, although not automatically connected with that fact, is that appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council will no longer come from the Supreme Court in Nigeria. As the House is aware, some very sensible arguments have been put forward in favour of having greater Commonwealth representation on the Judicial Committee. It has been suggested that it should go on circuit in Commonwealth countries, and not just stay in London. I think that if that came about the practice of appeals to the Privy Council might be accepted by the newly-independent countries.
They could more easily do this if the Judicial Committee were a kind of Commonwealth body, and not just a United Kingdom one. We had a debate last week on Commonwealth affairs, in which British Guiana featured. It might have been very useful to have been able to

say in respect of British Guiana that the system of appeals to the Privy Council could be continued. I think that it would give satisfaction, and the countries concerned could more easily accept it, if they knew the appeal was going to a Commonwealth court and not to a solely British one.
One of the consequences of the monarchic Constitution in the Commonwealth is that those countries that are not republics have to receive the Queen's approval to the appointment of ambassadors.
I am not absolutely certain that this is general but I know that it was King George V who laid down that the approval of the Crown must be obtained. Whereas it was recognised that the Governor-General, acting upon the advice of Ministers, would take all decisions, that power was not given for the appointment of ambassadors. It was laid down that the authority for the appointment of ambassador still resided not with the Government but with Buckingham Palace. Is it not possible for this now to be removed so that the appointment of ambassadors is done directly from the centre of power in the country?
This might not seem important to us but the present arrangement is a presentational disadvantage for a new country, although the reference is not to a British Government but to Her Majesty the Queen. This is worth looking at and it might help in enabling newly independent countries to keep a closer association with us within the monarchical constitutional system than they appear anxious to do at present.
This is no controversial issue and the Bill is welcomed by us all. I say on behalf of my hon. and right hon. Friends that we wish the Republic of Nigeria a peaceful and prosperous future. We shall always be anxious to do everything we can to maintain good relations and to co-operate fully in strengthening the bonds between our two countries.

10.22 p.m.

Miss Joan Vickers: I am glad to follow in the debate the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Bottomley). We have had many clashes in the past during which we have been able to debate points on which we have been in conflict. This Bill is drawn narrowly, and it does not allow one to say a great deal, but I take the opportunity of welcoming it and of saying how much I have appreciated in the past the generous hospitality and great courtesy shown to those who visit Nigeria.
Nigeria is now the seventh republic within the Commonwealth and, as the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East has done, I think that we should consider the future of countries which are becoming independent. I was delighted to read in the newspapers that this move to become a republic was welcomed in all the capital towns, in Kaduna, Enugu, Ibadan and Lagos. In my view,the decision was arrived at democratically. We must pay great tribute to the Nigerians for the democratic spirit they have shown in all the actions they have taken. Nigeria has given a great lead to other countries of Africa in the way it has worked out its system, particularly when it is realised that there are so many different types of people and different religions in the different regions. It was the united wish of the people that Nigeria should become a republic.
I should like to follow up what the right hon. Member said about future arrangements. When a country becomes independent some decision should be made straight away on whether or not it intends to become a republic. There is usually a period of about one year during which a country is under thejurisdiction of the Queen and then there is new legislation and another type of Constitution is adopted. There may also be a number of instances where the people do not wish their country to become a republic but they have great difficulty because if the Head of State is a Governor-General he enjoys no particular protocol once he leaves his own state. In other words, he has not the same level in protocol as a President, which puts him in a very difficult situation when he may wish to visit other countries. In our Commonwealth system, all Prime Ministers have equal status.
I should have thought it would not be beyond the realms of possibility that we should be able to find either a Chief of State or a Head of State—some name other than Governor-General—who might be on an equal basis with the President. We could exchange Ambassadors and High Commissioners.
I feel that there may in the future be quite a number of smaller Stales which would not wish to become republics and which may have difficulties. On the other hand, naturally they would wish their Heads of State to have equal precedence when they went abroad. I mention this because it was referred to by Sir Kashim Ibrahim when speaking of the inauguration of the republican Constitution of Nigeria, when he said that this marked the last milestone on the road to complete sovereignty. We know, thanks to the Statute of Westminster, 1931, that as and when a country becomes independent it has complete sovereignty.
Sir Kashim Ibrahim added:
The constitutional change brought into effect today is symbolic rather than actual. In this way it is made clear to the whole world that Nigeria is independent not only in fact but also in name".
I thought that highlighted the whole situation which, to my mind, is so unsatisfactory when dealing with these new independent countries.
As was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East, there have been several changes in the constitution and these are beneficial because, I understand, there will be a President for five years and the Prime Minister, on a vote of confidence, will be defeated, and this will bring the country closer to the democratic ideals which we have in this country.
I should like my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State to deal with the question of voluntary organisations. There are several voluntary organisations with which Nigeria works very closely. In fact, she gives a lead in connection with work for the blind, whose society is registered through certain Acts in this country. I should like to know whether this will be affected or whether we shall still be able to contribute to the funds, as we have


done hitherto, to help these organisations. Nigeria has not quite arrived at the level of the other republics. I would point outthat there are still some people in Nigeria who are not equal under the law. There are some people in the North in particular who still have no rights under the law. In fact, they do not even have the vote. I should have thought that in becoming a republic and wishing to get on the same basis as other republican countries, this point would be borne in mind and that all people would be given equal rights under the law.
As we have been reminded, tremendous advances have been made in education—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir W. Anstruther-Gray): I hope the hon. Lady will relate her remarks to this Bill.

Miss Vickers: I am sorry if I have not related all my remarks to the Bill. I thought it was in order to refer to the advantages to be gained from this Bill. I understand that it is expected that there will be more mutual understanding and co-operation between the regions, and I think this will be a physical advantage leading to the greater prosperity of the country in the future.
This republic which we welcome tonight has been sending a representative to the Privy Council. I think that he is the first person from the Commonwealth who has sat on the Privy Council and we would like to offer him, in particular, our thanks for the work he has done.
In the fact of Nigeria becoming a republic, we can safely leave the laws of the country in the hands of very able judges indeed. Nigeria has one of the best judicial systems within the Commonwealth, and this will be of benefit in protecting the rights of her people in future. Although they will no longer have the right of appeal to the Privy Council, we can rest assured that they will be given as much protection under their own courts as they would have received had this right been retained. I therefore welcome this Bill.

10.31 p.m.

Mr. E. L. Mallalieu: I want to add a few words of welcome to the Republic of Nigeria. I know it might be thought by some people that when

a country which has been, and remains, a member of the Commonwealth, decides to take a republican form of constitution, this is, in some way, a slight on this country or on the Crown. I am convinced, from what small knowledge I have of Nigerians, that this is not the case with them. Indeed, I do not think that it is the case with anyone else either, but I feel certain that it is not the case with them.
This Bill is merely a recognition of the realities of the situation. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Bottomley) said, it is hardly surprising that Africans should wish not to retain a Sovereign who must necessarily be an absent Sovereign. They want to see their Sovereign living amongst her own people and giving undivided attention to that people.
So, of course, it is more fitting to have a Head of State who is resident amongst them. I do not think that we have any reason to complain about that, and I am delighted that no one, on either side of this House at any rate, has complained about it.
I think that we can, however, shed a tear again about the Privy Council, not because the Nigerians are withdrawing their appeals in future from it, but because this was an instrument which, if properly treated, might have made for such great unification of our common law all over the Commonwealth, whereas now it can go its own way without any force holding it together.
Considering what a force, what an influence, this common law has been throughout the Commonwealth, and is in Nigeria, I think it is a tremendous tragedy that we have not grasped this question earlier and done something about it by making a circuit court for the Commonwealth, consisting of judges not only from this country but from all the others.
Some of us have pressed for this for many years in the House. I shed one further tear for the Under-Secretary of State—who is, to my knowledge, such a progressive and enlightened person in his dealings with the Commonwealth and all its peoples—that he should not have taken up this matter. He graciously said that he is not a lawyer. I think that was the very qualification for him to


do this very great thing. If it had been done by lawyers there might have been suspicions of ulterior motives. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will still do it, because I think that it can still be done.
I was talking recently to some Canadians. Canada was among the first to take leave of the Privy Council These Canadians told me that it was still the wish of many Canadians to become parties again to the Privy Council judicial system of appeal of the reformed nature of which I have been speaking.
This change to a republic will not be the only change which will come about in Nigeria. It would not surprise any of us to see changes in the Westminster model of Parliamentary government from time to time, but I think that we can speak with more optimism of the future of democracy in Nigeria, not necessarily on the Westminster model, but still effectively democracy, than we could of certain other countries which have come to independence in the last ten years or so.
There seem to be the conditions present in Nigeria, at any rate, at the centre, which will allow an effective form of democracy still to exist. One can only hope that this will be the case. It is not for us to lecture Nigerians or any other independent people on how to conduct their own affairs, especially constitutional affairs, unless, of course, they go so far beyond the decencies of civilised existence as to stamp out human rights completely Having regard to the circumstances in Nigeria, it is permissible to hope, and I am sure that we all fervently hope, that there will not befall Nigeria that which befell that gay and talented people on the coast of New Guinea when they became independent with such high hopes in the whole world and with such tragic results, temporarily, I hope.
We and the Nigerians have an immense amount of capital of good will invested in each other. Over the years during which Britons and Nigerians have marched together, links of friendship have been forged which it would be foolish in the extreme for either not to maintain. It will be of immense value to us and the whole world in the coming together of peoples if we maintain those links, and we ought to make every effort to do so.
That does not mean that we are not free to criticise each other. I hope that we shall never be afraid of doing something for fear that a member of the Commonwealth will leave it. If that happens, it merely means that the Government of the day in that country is taking its people out of the Commonwealth and not that we cannot still feelfriendly towards the people themselves; nor that we would not welcome them back if that Government had a change of attitude. It would be undignified in the extreme and stultifying if we were always to say that we must not do something for fear of a country leaving the Commonwealth, as though that were a terrible thing. It is not tragic if a people leaves an association, or if a Government leaves an association, of which it is not a fit member at a particular time. On the contrary, the association will be purified by their leaving it momentarily and in due course and the fullness of time coming back and being welcomed with open arms by the remaining members.
On this evening, when we enshrine in our law the wish of the Nigerian peoples to become a republic, I make no apology for returning to that wonderful remark which has already been quoted by the Parliamentary Secretary, which I heard, with him, in that hot room that day in Nigeria when Zik became Governor-General, and when the Prime Minister, in Churchillian tones and in the finest possible language, made that remarkable speech of welcome and his own testament with regard to freedom and to the Commonwealth connection. So fine were his words that they are worth quoting a second time this evening
The British came to us first as masters, then as partners, but always as friends".

10.40 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and for the Colonies (Mr. R. P. Hornby): I am delighted to be able to speak immediately after the words with which the hon. and learned Member for Brigg (Mr. E. L. Mallalieu) concluded his speech—words which were also mentioned by my hon. Friend in his opening speech. This has been a brief and an agreeable debate; brief because the Bill is both short and uncomplicated, and agreeable because it has provided us with the


opportunity of sending our good wishes to the leaders and the people of Nigeria—and also with the opportunity of mentioning one or two thoughts in our minds about the future shape of the Commonwealth.
It has been a particularly happy occasion for me to be able to make my first speech from this Bench on an occasion when the House is united in its feelings. I have been allowed to step quietly in at the shallow end and prepare myself perhaps for the rather deeper waters ahead. I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Bottomley) for his kind words, and I can assure him that I shall do my best to stay on this side of the House.
The House needs no reminding from me that the decision of a Commonwealth country to become a republic or to remain a monarchy is entirely a matter for that country. As the hon. and learned Member for Brigg said, we see no insult in a decision to become a republic; we see instead the decision of the people of the country concerned, and we fully understand it. To take any other view would be to deny all that we mean by independence in the modern Commonwealth.
This Bill, therefore—as my hon. Friend explained at the start of the debate—is merely making necessary changes in our law, arising out of Nigeria's decision to become a republic, as she did on 1st October this year. The Bill is to ensure that our law continues to operate precisely as it did before Nigeria became a republic.
I want to make a few comments on one or two of the points raised in the debate. First, I take the point raised by the right hon. Member and echoed by others, that we should consider in our future thinking and planning of constitutions whether or not it might be wise, in consultation with the Commonwealth country concerned, for that country to take the step and become a republic, if it wishes to do so, right at the start of its independent life. I will certainly take note of the feelings expressed on this subject tonight.
As for the Bill before us and the country that we are considering, I must point out that at the time when the independence constitution was being
framed, when Nigeria was moving towards independence, we received no representations from Nigeria that she wished to take that step and become a republic. We were, at that point of time, consulting the wishes of the representatives of the country concerned.
Secondly, I should like to refer to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Devonport (Miss Vickers) concerning voluntary organisations and whether there would be any change in their activities once Nigeria became a republic. This would not be so; there would no change of necessity arising from this Bill. The whole purpose of the Bill is that our law should remain unchanged in relation to Nigeria and there would be no alteration because she became a republic. If my hon. Friend cares to consider examples in other republican countries in the Commonwealth, she may know that in Ghana the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind is both active and flourishing in that republican country. In deference to your wishes, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, I had better not trespass on the grounds of women's votes; otherwise I might run into trouble with you.
Another point concerns the question of the Privy Council and possibilities of a Commonwealth Court of Appeal. This idea of a court of appeal has been raised before, as hon. Members have pointed out. It commends itself to my noble Friend the Lord Chancellor. We all hope that the establishment of such a court might prove possible, but it requires careful discussion and I am told that there are a number of difficulties involved. However, I remind the House—and will, I hope, comfort the House—by saying that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has recently been strengthened by the addition of some eminent Commonwealth judges. To give one example, only last term Sir Kenneth Gresson, President of the New Zealand Court of Appeal, sat with the Committee and his colleagues were indebted to him and to the New Zealand Court of Appeal for his valuable help.
Finally, I add my own good wishes to those which have already been expressed for the future of Nigeria. Nigeria, like any great country in a fast-changing world, faces many prob-


lems and many exciting challenges. In the years ahead I hope she will feel strengthened by the knowledge that she has many friends here in Britain and in this House, friends who rejoice in her achievements and who are willing and anxious to help her to the best of their ability.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr. Ian Fraser.]

Committee Tomorrow.

Orders of the Day — NYASALAND

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Ian Fraser.]

10.49 p.m.

Mr. Patrick Wall: I start by welcoming the appearance of my hon. Friend the Member for Ton-bridge (Mr. Hornby) to the Dispatch Box. He may be right in thinking that he has not been thrown in at the deep end, but to make two appearances at the Box on the first occasion is quite unusual. I hope he will not feel that the waters we are entering in turning from Nigeria to Nyasaland are too deep.
We have just welcomed the independence and, indeed, the republican status of that great country of Nigeria. Nyasaland, a smaller country in Central Africa, is to become independent in July. Until that time, in the eyes of the world, we in this country are responsible for what goes on in Nyasaland. Admittedly that responsibility is technically limited, because Nyasaland, since February, has been internally self-governing, but we still have direct influence and certainly have financial influence. In the near future, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and for the Colonies will be asking the House for £5 million or more to help the development of Nyasaland. As we have this influence, I believe that it is most important both to Nyasaland and to this country to make it clear to the world that British standards of justice will remain in that country as long as we hold responsibility.
A mass of reports indicate that these normal standards of justice, law and order are not being maintained. This may or may not be true. If it is true, I want to ask what is being done to put the matter right. Members of the Federal Parliament have made some very detailed accusations about certain incidents in Nyasaland. These accusations are known to all hon. Members; they have been printed and circulated to hon. Members. I am told that the Nyasaland Government have issued a White Paper rebutting the charges, but I do not know whether that is true for, although I have done my best to get this White Paper, I have been unable to do so. If they have issued a White Paper rebutting the charges, it has not been given publicity. That is bad for the Nyasaland Government and for the British Government and, in my view, justifies this debate. If these charges can be refuted, all the better, for they were made against Her Majesty's Government in Britain and not against Her Majesty's Government in Nyasaland.
I hope that this debate will not be represented as an attack on Dr. Banda's Government. It is not intended in that way. But all hon. Members will agree that such doubts do grave harm to Nyasaland. They may encourage Europeans to leave the country or discourage investment. The object of the debate is to "give opportunity to refute these charges if they are not true and to give publicity to the factthat law and order in Nyasaland is more satisfactory than it is said to be. I know that besides the Federal Government accusation other hon. Members as well as myself have received a large amount of correspondence from individuals in Nyasaland who have told them about other incidents which have been occurring all over the place and which have appeared to show that our normal traditional standards of law and order are not being maintained.
May I take this in two stages and consider first the European and then the African. Nyasaland needs Europeans, and Dr. Banda has made it clear that he wants them to stay. He has rightly said that Europeans who do not want to stay in Nyasaland under an African Government should go, and I think that we all accept that. On the


other hand, future conditions in Nyasaland must be tolerable to the Europeans to remain there, and their basic safeguard is the Bill of Rights, which is incorporated in the constitution of Nyasaland. In a speech on 22nd February, Dr. Banda asked,
Is not this paper, this Bill of Rights, just a piece of paper?
He added that the real safeguard for Europeans or anyone else who is not an African is the good will of the people of the country, and he is right. On the other hand, people who are not Africans and who remain in Nyasaland want to know what the safeguards laid down in the Bill of Rights will be maintained by an African Government, otherwise they will not stay, and these safeguards must depend to a great extent on the police and on the correct implementation of the law.
I therefore turn to the police. We have had reports about the police. I put a Question about the Malawi Party police in the House, and I was told that they had no legal entity and were not protected in any way by the law other thanthe way in which any normal citizen was protected by the law. I was told that they had no special standing. We know of the Kneile incident, when Europeans were beaten up for not stopping when Dr. Banda went past, and we hear that no prosecutions have followed that incident. That was confirmed in a written Question in Hansard today. Many of these kinds of incidents are caused by the Malawi Youth League, who are sometimes used as auxiliary police, and I want to refer to a speech by the Minister of Local Government in the National Legislature about the Malawi Youth League. He was speaking in a debate on the position of the European in an independent Nyasaland. The Minister of Local Government was making the point that Dr. Banda had said to his people that they must be friendly to the Europeans because they wanted them in the country. He went on to say:
If he (Dr. Banda) did give us permission to perpetuate acts of vengeance they would not be talking of law and order here. They would be fleeing like refugees. They would be running away and leaving their houses and properly here; not only there would not be deportation, because deportation is very, very constitutional, very lawful. We would just act, without plan, without organisation. We would let loose our Youth League on them, and, Mr. Speaker, you

probably know our Youth League. We have tough boys in the Youth League. Only one boy is enough to fix Mr. Peterkins (a European member of the Legislature). Even now as I speak the hands of the Youth League are itching.
That is not a very encouraging statement to be made by a Minister from the point of view of encouraging Europeans to remain in Nyasaland. It is perhaps enhanced by the news in the Press that the girl guide organisation and other youth organisations in Nyasaland have been suspended. It is said that the Minister of Education has circularised schoolmasters, instructing them to start organising young pioneer movements and saying that all other youth organisations must be closed down.
The real point I want to make with regard to Europeans is the Paternity Order Bill, the point being that as the law now stands a woman no longer has to supply corroboration of her claim as to paternity. When I questioned this I was informed that there was only one case in three years of a European being sued by an African woman, and there was very little sympathy for such Europeans in the community. Of course, this is true, but it misses the whole point.
This change in the law has been called the "blackmailers' charter", because it allows accusations to be made against Europeans by African women because a certain European may not be popular and it may be desired to get him out of the country. It is said that if the law were properly administered these charges would not stick.True, but my next point is that there have been some drastic changes made in the local courts. These courts now have jurisdiction over Europeans. The judicial powers have been withdrawn from administrative officers who have been replaced by African magistrates who have had only a six months' magistrates course. Legal advisers are not allowed in the courts except by the permission of the Minister of Justice, and Dr. Banda has stated that if they get this permission the African magistrates will presume them to be guilty.
There was a recent case on an affiliation order and the ruling of the local court was quashed by the High Court. On the appeal, it was made


clear that the president and assessor of the local court had no legal training at all. If these are the courts that Africans and Europeans have to go to to obtain justice, it does not give one much confidence in the justice that is available in Nyasaland today and which may be available in the future. It can be argued that people can appeal to the High Court. But the standards of the High Court may also be tampered with in the future. There is the case of Mr. Bredahl, who complained in court about a charge of assault. Instead of the culprits being convicted, Mr. Bredahl found himself convicted. He appealed against this conviction and it was quashed. This case was not directed against an unpopular Englishman but against a foreigner who happened to be in the country for a short time. This sort of thing will not give much confidence to Europeans to remain in Nyalasand. When these injustices happen at the moment, the sentences are quashed, but they may not be quashed in the future.
What about the Africans, because they are naturally the most concerned? My hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) and I have seen a political leader's house being burned down. There was the case of Mr. Muhone, public secretary of C.A.N.U., who was beaten up in public and against whose assailants no charge has been preferred. These are actions against political leaders,but what really concerns me is the large number of charges that are being preferred against ordinary people for using insulting behaviour to Dr. Banda or for not possessing M.C.P. cards. I have in mind the case of Mr. James Chipwanya, a police pensioner with 20 years' service to his credit. He was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and a fine of £50. On appeal his sentence was increased to a year. There have been many similar cases.
For example, on 23rd June, Mr. Zakaria of Saliwa and Mr. MenardiKasitete of Mbinza were beaten up for not possessing M.C.P. cards. They were taken to a local court, were beaten up again, their hair was set on fire and they were imprisoned for the night. In the morning they were ordered to pay five years' subscriptions to the M.C.P. funds. Is it a legal offence not to possess a party

card? If not, why have there been so many cases reported from all parts of Nyasaland about what has happened to people who are not in possession of these cards? This is an extremely serious matter to which we require an answer.
We must also consider the question of loyal servants of well-known Europeans in Nyasaland. I am thinking, in particular, of what happened at the Roman Catholic Church at Kalembuka during Mass. A member of the M.Y.L. came into the Church and got hold of one of the foremen of a local European farmer and asked for his M.C.P. card. The foreman told them to go to hell. They told him that he would be killed later. It is understood that the village headman was ordered to have the foreman's house demolished. They said that later, after independence, he would be dealt with. Nothing has happened to this man or his property as yet, but who knows what will happen after independence?
These allegations may be untrue. Many of the incidents and allegations may be exaggerated. Nevertheless, they have been made—many of them as far back as last June. Despite this, they have not yet been answered by Her Majesty's Government and it is in order to get an answer that I have initiated tonight's debate.
Yesterday, my hon. Friend the Member for Chigwell (Mr. Biggs-Davison) asked my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Colonies in a Written Question how many police officers had resigned from service in Nyasaland in the present year and what reasons had been given for their resignations. My right hon. Friend, in a Written Answer, replied:
None, although 47 have accepted invitations to retire under a limited compensation scheme to expedite the localisation programme."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th November, 1963; Vol. 684, c. 68.]
It is obvious that a man will not resign immediately for a principle if he can resign and take advantage of a scheme of compensation. It is important to realise the significance of this number of retirements.
I want to ask certain definite questions. Since so many court orders or judgments have been quashed, are Her Majesty's Government satisfied with the


organisation and training of the local courts? Is this training sufficient? What is being done to control the M.Y.L. and stop intimidation? Is it yet a criminal offence not to possess an M.C.P. card? Are the Government considering how the rights of Europeans who are politically opposed to M.C.P. will be protected after independence? I fear that we shall hear a lot more about what will happen to Europeans after independence.
Great concern has been expressed in the House about Chief Enahoro. There has also been a great deal of talk about Nigerian justice. My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) spoke on this subject earlier. We have heard tonight that Nigeria has one of the best systems of justice in the Commonwealth. At present, there are accusations and correspondence with hon. Members of this House about justice in Nyasaland. Many of these accusations and questions remain unanswered. Would the Government consider the appointment of an intergovernmental investigation, perhaps under the direction of such a distinguished person as that friend of the Africans Sir Robert Tredgold? This should be done not in order to condemn Dr. Banda's Government but to show clearly that these accusations are exaggerated and perhaps that many of them are untrue. Only when we restore confidence in justice in Nyasaland can that country go forward to independence as a truly non-racial country.

11.5 p.m.

Sir Godfrey Nicholson: I am very sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall) has raised this matter tonight, since he has not even taken the trouble to read the refutation of Mr. Julian Greenfield's charges, published by the Nyasaland Government. A copy is in the Library of this House. Anybody could make a similar speech about any country in the world; a Member of the Nyasaland Parliament could make exactly the same sort of speech about the police here, and with specific cases, too. These are vague and generalised charges. I say definitely that the administration of justice in Nyasaland is of a very high level. It may not be perfect, or even

as high as it is here, but my hon. Friend's speech is based upon exaggerations and untruths.

Mr. A. G. Bottomley: I merely want to congratulate the hon. Baronet the Member for Farnham (Sir G. Nicholson) on what he has just said.

11.7 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and for the Colonies (Mr. R. P. Hornby): Despite what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham (Sir G. Nicholson) and by the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Bottomley), I am personally grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall) for raising this subject. I say that because I am sure that the whole House would agree that the preservation of law and order and the impartial administration of justice are the indispensable foundation-stones of any civilised society. It is true that suggestions have recently been made that all is not well in these respects in Nyasaland. It is also true that the Federal Minister of Law in Central Africa has called the attention of the Federal Parliament to a number of disturbing cases, and my hon. Friend has echoed some of these complaints tonight.
First, therefore, I want to make it quite clear that the Government take serious note of any such complaints. I would not wish in any way to minimise the responsibility we have for ensuring that the rule of law holds sway in Nyasaland. In taking that view, I think that I can also say, and I will try to show to my hon. Friend also, that our feelings are shared by the Nyasaland Government, whose leaders fully recognise how much damage can be done to the reputation of their country by some of the allegations that have been made against them.
Perhaps I can best help my hon. Friend and the House if I try to deal in some detail with one or two of the points he has made, and then go on to make some more general comments about the way in which the law is being administered in Nyasaland, and what proposals the Nyasaland Government have for improvements in that respect.
The House will also probably like to know, as my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham has pointed out, that members of the Deputy-Governor's office in Nyasaland have made careful inquiries into a number of recent incidents, and copies of their Report, entitled "The Rule of Law in Nyasaland" have been placed in the Library. It is on that Report that I am very largely drawing, and I very much hope that my hon. Friend and others will read it, as it will show that many of the facts differ substantially from the allegations that have been made; and that, in every case, improper decisions have been quashed with the maximum possible speed and, in other cases, where appropriate, proceedings have been instituted.
I would add that if at any time my hon. Friend, or other hon. Members, care to bring to my attention specific cases besides those mentioned tonight or dealt with in the Report, I will do my best to have them investigated—

Mr. Wall: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, but I sent several cases to the Central Africa Office six weeks ago, and have not yet had a reply.

Mr. Hornby: I will do my best to see that my hon. Friend has a reply as soon as possible.
I should now like in the time available to refer to one or two points made by my hon. Friend. First, there is the Bill of Rights. Full provision is included in the Constitution for any person who claims that his rights under the Bill of Rights have been violated to seek redress in the High Court of Nyasaland, and the fact is that no person of any race or group has yet sought the High Court's protection under this Section.
Secondly, there are the actions of the police and the suggestion that the law is not being impartially administered. One of the cases referred to in the report of the Federal Minister of Justice concerned the assault on three Europeans, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice referred. The point there, as reported to me, was that the proceedings were begun and an identification parade was organised. The three Europeans were unable to identify

any of the assailants and there were no grounds for proceeding with the case.
Another instance was that of the Danish subject who was working in Nyasaland with a firm of contractors and was a witness in an assault charge against an African co-employee. At the end of the trial he was himself convicted summarily of conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace and was sentenced to imprisonment. If my hon. Friend will study the report in the Library he will find that the local court Commissioner had reviewed the case, ordered a retrial and had set at liberty the convicted person within 24 hours of sentence being passed. Subsequently the Director of Public Prosecutions terminated all further proceedings.
Next there was the case of Mr. James Chipembere. This was one of the cases concerning the use of insulting language against the political leaders of the country. The point to note here is that the use of insulting language or other conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace is an offence which can be brought before the courts. The point to be made is that there is a possibility of a breach of the peace if insulting comment is made against a highly popular leader. And if a breach of the peace is likely to take place, there is the possibility there, as in other countries, of a case being brought forward.
In the time available I should now like to say something about the background to these cases. As my hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice knows, a reorganisation of the courts was carried out in Nyasaland in 1962. As a result, the 207 old chiefs' courts were replaced by a system of 163 local courts constituted by the Minister of Justice. These changes were made as a deliberate attempt to improve the administration of justice and to separate it clearly from the executive, a separation which had not existed before at this level.
The new system has undoubtedly had its teething troubles. My hon. Friend is quite right about that. They spring mainly from the experience of the presidents of the local courts and from the speed with which these new courts were set up. It is for this reason that I should like to mention particularly the Regional


Commissioners and the Chief and Deputy-Chief Commissioners of these Regional Courts. These men are fully trained and experienced officers and they now possess full powers to review and if necessary to quash any sentence of a local court which in their opinion has been improperly imposed. It is therefore through them that remedial action has been taken in many of the cases to which my hon. Friend referred.
As to the improvement of court procedure, the Nyasaland Government have taken a number of measures to improve the conduct of these Local Courts. For example, a law school staffed by qualified lecturers from Britain and America has been established near Blantyre for the training of local court presidents and clerks, and so far about 100 have attended. Courses of training are being organised by the Regional Commissioners. The appeal system has been considerably strengthened. Twenty new local appeal courts have been set up. The Chief Justice intends that these appeal courts should go on circuit, thereby making it easier for defendants to exercise the right of appeal if they so wish. The right of legal representation has been established in all these appeal courts as well as in some 17 of the local courts, and it is the intention of the Nyasaland Government to extend this right of legal representation, which never existed before under the old African courts, as soon as practicable—that is to say, as soon as the courts themselves become sufficiently ex-

perienced in the handling of legal evidence.
To summarise, therefore, I would say quite openly that there certainly have been cases of rowdyism, and perhaps worse, and that this has been publicly condemned by Dr. Banda. There have also been cases of maladministration of justice, but these have been promptly dealt with by the Regional Commissioners as soon as they came to their attention. It should also be realised that the cases in question have been very few in number. To the best of my knowledge, there have been fewer than 20 such complaints. That figure should be set against the 3,000 to 4,000 cases which are dealt with in the Blantyre Urban Court alone in one year. The efforts which are being made to improve the training of court presidents and the opportunities for appeal reflect the determination of the Nyasaland Government to see that justice is properly administered.
I conclude, therefore, by saying once again that I will gladly investigate any specific cases that are brought to my attention and that so long as the Government hold responsibility for law and order in Nyasaland we remain pledged to do all in our power to secure the rule of law, but I cannot see that it would be helpful to securing the rule of law to institute proceedings that my hon. Friend suggested at the end of his speech.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at seventeen minutes past Eleven o'clock.